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Chapter 4: Mud volcano fluids
65 Chapter 4
The expelled mud volcano fluids (gas, water and sediment particles): first attempt
Christina Heller1*, Andreas Reimer1, Martin Blumenberg1, 2,Martin Krüger3, Marco Taviani4, Joachim Reitner1
Manuskript
*Corresponding author: cheller1@gwdg.de
1Geoscience Centre, University of Goettingen, Goldschmidtstr. 3, 37077 Goettingen, Germany
2Courant Centre Geobiology, University of Goettingen, Goldschmidtstr. 3, 37077 Goettingen, Germany
3Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) im Geozentrum Hannover, Stilleweg 2, 30655 Hannover, Germany
4Istituto di Scienze Marine – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via Gobetti 101, 40129 Bologna, Italy
Chapter 4: Mud volcano fluids
66 Abstract
Terrestrial mud volcanoes in Italy which are part of this study are situated in the Northern Apennines and Sicily and were formed by the expulsion of water and mud as well as gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons. Most of the mud volcanoes worldwide are associated with an active petroleum reservoir. In there, several secondary microbial and diagenetic processes occur. The expelled gases deriving from the reservoirs are dominated by methane, higher hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide and are of early mature thermogenic origin. The higher n-alkanes extracted from the emitted fluids indicate an immature source rock likely mixed with fresh organic matter, confirming the results made by gas analyzes. Carbon stable isotope analyzes of the carbon dioxide provide evidence for biodegradation and secondary microbial methanogenesis taking place in the fluid reservoir. The expelled waters derived from a depth of 2 km are brackish, and provide evidence for the influence of secondary diagenetic processes directly in the reservoirs or during the rise of the fluids. Therefore, the expelled mud volcano fluids derive from deep-situated reservoirs which provide ideal conditions for microbial activities.
4.1 Introduction
Reports of mud volcanism in Italy can be traced far back in history. First of all, Pliny reported in his Naturalis Historia (AD 77) about mud volcanism in Italy (Conte 1982). Three areas, in Northern Italy e.g. the Salse di Nirano, central Italy and Sicily e.g. the Maccalube di Aragona (Martinelli and Judd, 2004) are most prominent with respect to mud volcanism in Italy. The arc-shaped Apennines, one of the youngest mountain chains on earth, is a thrust-and-fold belt that was formed during the Neogene and Quaternary in conjunction with the rotation and motion of the Corsica-Sardinia block and the following opening of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Apennine chain consists of the northern Apennine arc, a stack of northeast-vergent thrust sheets, and the southern Apennine arc (Muttoni et al., 1998; Vai and Martini, 2001). In Northern Italy, mud volcanism is located in the foreland of the Northern Apennines in a zone of tectonic compression (Martinelli and Judd, 2004).
Sicily is located along the Eurasia-Nubia convergent plate boundary (Dewey et al., 1989; Serpelloni et al., 2007; Catalano et al., 2008). This collision complex is characterized by three different areas, (1) the Hyblean Foreland outcropping in
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