What is Bowen's Reaction Series?

What is Bowen's Reaction Series?

Bowen's reaction series is able to explain why certain types of minerals tend to be found together while others are almost never associated with one another. He experimented in the early 1900s with powdered rock material that was heated until it melted and then allowed to cool to a target temperature whereupon he observed the types of minerals that formed in the rocks produced.




The idealized progression which they determined is still accepted as the general model for the evolution of magmas during the cooling process. As with everything else in geology, there are exceptions to this rule , but for the most part it works.

Bowen determined that specific minerals form at specific temperatures as a magma cools. At the higher temperatures associated with mafic and intermediate magmas, the general progression can be separated into two branches. 

The continuous branch describes the evolution of the plagioclase feldspars as they evolve from being calcium-rich to more sodium-rich. The discontinuous branch describes the formation of the mafic minerals olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite mica.

The weird thing that Bowen found concerned the discontinuous branch. At a certain temperature a magma might produce olivine, but if that same magma was allowed to cool further, the olivine would "react" with the residual magma, and change to the next mineral on the series (in this case pyroxene). 

Continue cooling and the pyroxene would convert to amphibole, and then to biotite. Mighty strange stuff, but if you consider that most silicate minerals are made from slightly different proportions of the same 8 elements, all we're really doing here is adjusting the internal crystalline lattice to achieve stability at different temperatures. Really no big deal.

At lower temperatures, the branches merge and we obtain the minerals common to the felsic rocks - orthoclase feldspar, muscovite mica, and quartz (the banana slug of the mineral world).

 Simply put, the high temperature minerals, the first ones to crystallize in a mass of magma, are most unstable at the Earth's surface and quickest to weather because the surface is most different from the conditions under which they were created. On the other hand, the low temperature minerals are much more stable because the conditions at the surface are much more similar to the conditions under which they formed.