Influence of Landscape Morphology and Vegetation Cover on The Sampling of Mixed Plutonic Bodies

A plethora of evidence indicates that magma mixing processes can take place at any evolutionary stage of magmatic systems and that they are extremely common in both plutonic and volcanic environments. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that the magma mixing process is governed by chaotic dynamics whose evolution in space and time generates complex compositional patterns. The fact that magma mixing processes can produce igneous bodies exhibiting a large compositional complexity brings up the key question about the potential pitfalls that may be associated with the sampling of these systems for petrological studies. In particular, since commonly only exiguous portions of the whole magmatic system are available as outcrops for sampling, it is important to address the point whether the sampling may be considered representative of the complexity of the magmatic system. Here, we attempt to address this crucial point by performing numerical simulations of magma mixing processes in 3D, and by evaluating the best conditions for sampling by considering different landscape morphologies and percentages of vegetation cover. It is shown that the goodness of sampling is strongly dependant on the roughness of the landscape, with highly irregular morphologies being the best candidates to give the most complete information on the whole magma body. Vegetation cover, on the contrary, does not appear to significantly influence the representativeness of sampling.