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Progress in Earth and Planetary Science
Fig. 7 | Progress in Earth and Planetary Science

Fig. 7

From: Formation, preservation and extinction of high-pressure minerals in meteorites: temperature effects in shock metamorphism and shock classification

Fig. 7

The cooling paths of typical moderately to highly shocked meteorites. The adiabatic release paths (cyan, red and purple lines) are from Fig. 5. HP and LP melt refer to shock melt that crystallizes before and after pressure release, respectively. The vertical line represents pure heat transfer from shock melt veins (SMV) to solid groundmass without synchronous pressure drop by decompression. The dark yellow line shows the approximated temperature of triggering rapid HP transformation. The grey area represents the conditions for destruction of akimotoite (ilm), ringwoodite (rwd) and garnet (gt) by amorphization or back transformation. The blue and green lines represent combinations of decompression and synchronous heat-transfer, where blue corresponds to rapid thermal quench with crystallization at high pressure and green corresponds to a greater contribution for decompression, resulting in crystallization at slightly lower pressure and partial annealing in the grey area. The shown P–T paths are technically for chondritic/ultramafic rocks but the concepts also work for mafic rocks. The top x-axis shows shock stage classification with deformation features of chondrite (C) and mafic meteorite (M) such as basaltic shergottite (Stöffler et al. 1991, 2018)

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