A review of anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility analysis of Indian dykes: Implications for magma emplacement

The analysis of Anisotropy of Magnetic Susceptibility (AMS) is a powerful and rapid technique to examine the preferred orientations of mineral (magnetic) fabrics and can indicate the nature of a magma transport (vertical or lateral). The relationship between magnetic fabric and geometry of a dyke swarm enables us to understand magma emplacement processes. Depending on the mutual relationship of magnetic fabric and individual dyke geometry, mode of magma transport is interpreted. The knowledge on the nature of magma transport combined with information on geometry, magmatic overpressure and geochemistry enable us to comment on dyke emplacement processes, the location of possible feeders, syn-emplacement and post-emplacement deformations and prevailing stress regime during emplacement. A number of dykes and dyke swarms have been emplaced into the Indian shield at different points in time. Their ages vary from the Mesoarchean to Tertiary. We present here a review of three case studies where AMS technique was applied to the samples collected from Indian dykes. Two case studies are on the Proterozoic dykes that intruded into the Dharwar craton and the third case study is on Mesozoic dykes that punctured the South Indian Granulite Terrain (SIGT). The dykes generally show “normal” anisotropy fabric to indicate vertical magma emplacement with few exceptions where lateral/inclined magma flow was suggested or the results were inconclusive. We present here a critical review on the interpretation of such “anomalous” fabrics and comment on further studies that can be carried out to extract more information from such results.