ИСТИНА

Mineral-hosted glassy melt inclusions (MIs) have been used to quantify magma volatile contents for several decades. Despite the growing number of volatile studies utilizing MIs, it has not been tested whether there is a physical limit on how much dissolved volatiles a glassy MI can contain. We explored the limits of MIs as hydrous magma recorders in an experimental study, showing that there is a limit of dissolved H2O that glassy MIs cannot exceed. These results show there is potential bias in the glassy MI data set; they can only faithfully record pre-eruptive H2O contents in the upper-most part of the Earth’s crust where H2O-solubility is low. The current MI database cannot be used to robustly estimate the full range of arc magmas and therefore assess volatile budgets in primitive or evolved compositions. Such magmas may contain much larger amounts of H2O than currently recognized and the diversity of magma evolutionary pathways in subduction zones is likely being significantly underappreciated.