Quaternary magmatism above a slab tear, Northern Andes of Colombia

Abstract

<p>The north Andean block evidences by its shallow to intermediate seismicity a juxtaposition of a southern, relatively steeply dipping slab segment with a correlating volcanic arc and a northern flat slab domain, where a margin-parallel volcanic arc became extinct since the Late Miocene. The clear-cut offset of the seismic pattern suggests the presence of a slab tear, which has its correlative morphological expression by a distinct lineament in the Cauca Valley and separates, within the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia, a southern narrow antiformal cordilleran tract from a northern composite belt with an axial depression that constitutes the High Plain of Bogotá. Faults are consistently blind and associated with tight, basement-cored folds with inverted limbs at the mountain front and distinct domes separated by marginal synclines. These structures belong to a young deformation phase as they were superposed on older cylindrical fold trains. Their ductile deformation style may be associated with a thermal anomaly as evidenced by abnormally high Ro data. In order to assess the age of this folding we extracted zircons from a rhyolitic dike that straddles a marginal syncline of a major dome. U-Pb age data indicate a recycling of these crystals from a Neoproterozoic volcanoclastic sequence that composes the basement of this marginal part of the Cordillera. Euhedral overgrowths yield, however, Quaternary ages that we tentatively associate to the advance of the outer bend of the flat slab to its present position.</p>