8-1 Magma dynamics and melt physics; viscosity

measurements.
Today we're going to talk about the rheology, the flow properties of magmas and of
melts.
And we are going to start by discussing the viscosity of the liquid state.
Now, the rheology of these systems, their ability to flow really defines what makes
them so important in Earth history.
And also of course, it is the essence of their transport, which allows them to generate
eruptions at the Earth's surface.
So, there are a number of reasons why we really would like to understand the rheology
of these systems very well.
First of all, we're interested in the emplacement of these systems in the earth's crust.
Large volumes of crystallized magma are often responsible for ore deposits which form
at depths within the earth of a variety of different materials which are vital to our
societies.
We're also interested in how these materials collect at all at greater depths where the
rocks are initially melted.
Why do they collect into large bodies of magma at depth, and what does this mean for
the deep geophysical imaging of the Earth.
Of course, we're also interested in their more rapid ascent and the eruption at the Earth
surface, as we already alluded to, at the beginning of this course, the variability of the
chemistry of the liquids, which come out of volcanoes is the main reason for the
variability of their explosive, or variability at all of their eruptive behavior.
And finally, once these materials come out of the Earth, the story is not quite over.
Even if they come out of the Earth as fragmental material, in many, many cases, these
volcanic deposits undergo a greater or a lesser extent of remobilization of the material
again in the liquid state.
So remarkable fact, we term the phrase, rheology or rheomorphic flows and we also
have the phrase, welding to describe the compaction, the loss of porosity and, if you
will, the re-glassification of what our previously pumiceous or very, very vesicular
fragmental materials.
There are also a number of fundamental reasons to understand the temperature,
pressure, and composition dependence of the viscosity of silicate liquids.
And they involve basic understanding of liquid properties and structure property
relationships.
And studies analyzing the viscosity temperature relationships of various liquid glasses
or popping up regularly in the physics and in the physical chemistry literature.
And almost always when they do there is an example of two taken from the silicate
liquid systems.
Because they represent one end of the range of temperature-viscosity relationships with
SiO
2
itself being the most viscous liquid in existence.
Now how do we determine rheological properties?
The following diagram shows you that we have a wide variety of geometries that have
been employed in order to determine the viscosity of silicate liquids.
You can see as you go from the left upper part of this diagram, two examples, which are
based upon the movement of a sphere through a liquid body at a terminal velocity of
falling or floating, which, related through the density contrast between the sphere and
the surrounding liquid, can allow us to derive the viscosity from the Stokesian law
describing the motion of the sphere in the liquid.
And 1 of these 2 methods you can note is attached to an external driving force in the
form of a balance or a set of weights.
And there we can actually artificially increase the load or the force or if you will, the
(Delta Rho), the change in density, in order to look at the viscosity.
For example, of much more viscous melts which require a forcing of the transfer of the
sphere through the liquid.
If you go to the right, you see something which has the geometry of a cylinder, and a
second cylinder inside the first.
This is the so called Couette geometry.
It's the concentric cylinder geometry.
It's the, if you will, the most common way of determining the viscosity of high
temperature low viscosity liquids, and what we basically have is a sheer deformation
induces in the liquid.
By a rotating, either outer cylinder, the cup, or by a rotation of the inner cylinder, the
spindle, or by both.
And in the case of the rotation, you're usually rotating at a constant rate in the standard
concentric cylinder technique, and it is the measurement of the resistance of the liquid
to its own deformation, the shear stress exerted on the spindle by the liquid, which is
recorded to obtain the ratio of the strain rate t0 the shear stress being sustained.
There is another type of experiment that one can perform with the concentric cylinder
method, and that is applicable to liquids with a lower viscosity.
And that is a so-called oscillation viscometry experiment.
And in this case, one can literally wind up, as in a spring, the rotation of the bob or the
spindle in the liquid, and then set it in motion by releasing the restraining force.
And see how it unwinds essentially within an oscillatory variation in the angular
position of the bob which is damped out as you go with time from the left to the right.
And this damping can be fitted with the curve, which will describe the viscosity which
is basically what's causing the loss of energy from the wave, which it would have been
produced for the rotation or for the oscillation within the liquid.
And if you look at the upper right corner you can see a so called penetration technique
it's an application of a force either by its own weight or by an excess weight.
Put upon it of a certain geometric form which is on the surface of the liquid and which
will now penetrate into the liquid as a result of disloading.
And its rate of penetration into the liquid is described by calibration of geometric laws,
which allows us to derive the viscosity of the liquid. If you look at the bottom left, you
see two fiber-based techniques, or rod-based techniques, and in these cases we have a
tensile force working on the liquid. In one case it's the actual gravitational body force of
the liquid itself, which is having it sag with time and lengthen under its own weight.
In the second case, it's an applied force, literally pull the fiber by tensile stress to
lengthen it and measure the amount of force we have to apply to achieve a certain rate
of lengthening and then to correct for the various geometric effects of that lengthening,
thinning of the fiber and so on, we can also derive the viscosity. And if you look in the
middle of the lower set of experiments you can see what is a very, very common
technique for the composite materials in the material literature, and that is the so called
beam bending technique.
It's very well and widely described because it is very easy to prepare samples for this
technique, simply have to cut samples into a rectangular form.
And then you can have a three point loading system, you can have two points on the
two ends below and you can have one point either observing the deformation of the
material under its own weight.
As it sags as the beam bends, or with an added load in order to force at a higher stress a
faster rate of strain.
If we move on, we look at the very first glimpse now that we get quantitatively of the
temperature dependence of the viscosity of some archetypical or canonical liquids.
If you look at this diagram, you will see a handful of liquid compositions, and you will
see them plotted as the logarithm of the viscosity on the vertical axis versus the
reciprocal of absolute temperature.
So it's an Arrhenian plot, as we've already observed, for the relaxation time versus
temperature. And you can see in the upper left part of the diagram the curve for SiO
2
.
So the most abundant component in liquid rocks and it has the highest viscosity of any
liquid that is ever been measured.
At any temperature Si0
2
will have the highest viscosity.
It also has the viscosity at its own melting point.
And these are features which are unique really to the silicate world.
If you look across the diagram you can see in the center a dashed lined, which
represents a so-called soda-lime glass (Ca-Na-glass) .
It is the standard industrial glass. And you can see that for melt now which has several
tens of weight percent of SiO
2
less in concentration that there's a drastic drop. You try to
vertically estimate the distance from SiO
2
curve to soda-lime (Ca-Na) glass curve in this
plot, you'll see many, many, many orders of magnitude are dropping in viscosity at a
constant temperature of preparation.
We go over to the extreme right of the diagram, we can see another very simple
chemistry of a liquid B
2
O
3
, boron oxide, has a very curved temperature-viscosity
relationship and has a very low viscosity in comparison to th other liquids. And then
towards the center again, at the base, you can see BeF
2
, Beryllium fluoride. It's taken as
an analog for SiO
2
in terms of its structure.
It also, however, has a very, very low viscosity-temperature relationship.
And finally GeO
2
, which also is often used as an analog for SiO2 in geophysical
determinations of properties of minerals and melts. But all of these other liquids, all of
these other oxide liquids and fluoride liquid, that you see there, have much, much lower
viscosities than that of SiO
2
.
Now, if we look in more detail, at what influences the viscosity as we begin to add
components to SiO
2
.
The first example here is sodium oxide (Na
2
O).
It's a binary system then: sodium oxide- SiO
2
on the left hand-side you see SiO
2
plotted
in terms of a series of data points running up the left axis, where the temperatures are
assigned at the values of viscosity that obtain.
And then you see, as you move into the body of the diagram, a series of curves, which
are a plot of the constant temperature of the variation of viscosity with the addition of
sodium oxide to the SiO
2
base.
And you can see all of those curves have very moderate slopes, from about 5% of
sodium oxide all the way to about 45% of sodium oxide, there's only a variation of a
couple of log units of viscosity.
But what you have to really pay attention to notice is that if you try to link those lines of
viscosity versus composition to the axis, to the vertical axis where silica itself sits, then
you have to link, for example, the line which contains 1000 degrees Celsius data to the
very upper left corner of the diagram, where SiO
2
exhibits it's viscosity at 1000 degrees
Celsius, that means you're moving from a viscosity at about 15% of sodium oxide,
which is 10 to the 4 or 10,000 Pascal seconds, up to a viscosity of 10 to the 16.
That's over 10 log units of viscosity increase. And it shows how enormous the influence
of the additions of secondary components to SiO
2
, to quartz glass, as it is commonly
called, is.
It's strongly non-linear. It has its most drastic drop in the first few percent of the
addition.
Here of alkali oxide and also in the case of many, many other components, which occur
in impurities in SiO
2
.
In fact, it's very difficult to determine a unique viscosity temperature curve for SiO
2

glass, because any kind of impurity, which is present in the glass will already have a
significance influence on the viscosity-temperature relationship.
And so trying to fix the viscosity of pure SiO
2
is very, very challenging because
sometimes the impurities are sodium, sometimes the impurities are water molecules.
For various industrial applications, various kinds of quartz glass are produced.
And all of them in detail have different viscosity-temperature relationships.