Kuniyo Kawabata

Present-day principal horizontal stress orientations in the Kumano forearc basin of the southwest Japan subduction zone determined from IODP NanTroSEIZE drilling Site C0009

A 1.6 km riser borehole was drilled at site C0009 of the NanTroSEIZE, in the center of the Kumano forearc basin, as a landward extension of previous drilling in the southwest Japan Nankai subduction zone. We determined principal horizontal stress orientations from analyses of borehole breakouts and drilling-induced tensile fractures by using wireline logging formation microresistivity images and caliper data. The maximum horizontal stress orientation at C0009 is approximately parallel to the convergence vector between the Philippine Sea plate and Japan, showing a slight difference with the stress orientation which is perpendicular to the plate boundary at previous NanTroSEIZE sites C0001, C0004 and C0006 but orthogonal to the stress orientation at site C0002, which is also in the Kumano forearc basin. These data show that horizontal stress orientations are not uniform in the forearc basin within the surveyed depth range and suggest that oblique plate motion is being partitioned into strike-slip and thrusting. In addition, the stress orientations at site C0009 rotate clockwise from basin sediments into the underlying accretionary prism.

Quartz deposition and its influence on the deformation process of megathrusts in subduction zones

We present a quantitative examination of the liberation and subsequent deposition of silica at the subduction zone plate interface in the Mugi mélange, an exhumed accretionary complex in the Shimanto Belt of southwest Japan. Frequency and thickness measurements indicate that mineralized veins hosted in deformed shales make up approximately 0.4% of the volume of this exposure. In addition, whole-rock geochemical evidence suggests that the net volume of SiO2 liberated from the mélange at temperatures of < 200°C was as much as 35%, with up to 40% of the SiO2 loss related to the smectite-illite (S-I) conversion reaction, and the rest attributable to the pressure solution of detrital quartz and feldspar. Kinetic modeling of the S-I reaction indicates active liberation of SiO2 at approximately 70°C to 200°C, with peak SiO2 loss at around 100°C, although these estimates should be slightly shifted toward lower temperature conditions based on X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses of mixed-layer S-I in the Mugi mélange. The onset of pressure solution was not fully constrained, but has been documented to occur at around 150°C in the study area. The deposition in deformed shales of quartz liberated by pressure solution and the S-I reaction is probably linked to seismogenic behavior along the plate interface by (1) progressively enhanced velocity-weakening properties, which are favorable for unstable seismogenic faulting, including very-low-frequency earthquakes and (2) increasing intrinsic frictional strength, which leads to a step-down of the plate boundary décollement into oceanic basalt.