Tracking the transition from strike-lip to subduction along the southern Caribbean Plate: high-resolution thermochronology and provenance of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia

Abstract

Despite its prominent topographic relief of up to 8 km and its location in the tropics, where erosional processes are intense, the Santa Marta Sierra Nevada (SMSN), in northern Colombia has undergone moderate uplift rates at ~0,1-0,3 mm/yr since at least 15 Ma, associated to strike-slip tectonics along the southern Caribbean Margin. This documentation has relied on bedrock and detrital thermochronology carried out in modern sediment and in small Miocene strata exposed in small adjacent depocenters that are now exposed in the range's margins due to tectonic inversion since 10 Ma. The earlier record of uplift and exhumation associated with subduction, collision, and right-lateral strike-slip lie buried in the adjacent Colombian Caribbean Basin, in the north, and into Vale Inferior do Magdalena Basin, in the southwest, where oil exploration is active. Thus, it is understood that a multi-method detrital thermochronometry study of selected late Eocene-Miocene well samples will allow documentation of the: i) exhumation patterns of early mountain building in the SMSN; ii) strike-slip displacement of the faults (Oca - El Pilar) that constitute the southern limit of the Caribbean Plate; and, iii) spatial-temporal position of the leading edge of the Caribbean Plate associated with dextral, eastern migration. (AU)