Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The geology of Chile is a characterized by processes linked to subduction, such as volcanism, earthquakes, and orogeny. The building blocks of Chile's geology were assembled during the Paleozoic Era when Chile was the southwestern margin of the supercontinent Gondwana .
The subduction of the Chile Ridge beneath the Chile Trench provides a suitable analog for the initiation of the Archean continental crust via the melting of deep oceanic crust. [4] This is because the Chile Ridge subduction is the only example in the world that the overriding plate is a continental one.
The trench is also a part of the Chile triple junction, an unusual junction that consists of a mid-oceanic ridge and the Chile Rise being subducted under the South American plate at the Peru–Chile Trench. Two seamount ridges within the Nazca plate enter the subduction zone along this trench: the Nazca Ridge and the Juan Fernández Ridge.
About 15 million years ago in the Miocene the Chile Ridge began to subduct beneath the southern tip of Patagonia (55° S). The point of subduction, the triple junction has gradually moved to the north and lies at present at 47° S. The subduction of the ridge has created a northward moving "window" or gap in the asthenosphere beneath South ...
Diagram of a cross-section of the Patagonia slab window. The Nazca plate and Antarctic plate are colliding with the South American plate at the Chile Ridge. [1]In geology, a slab window is a gap that forms in a subducted oceanic plate when a mid-ocean ridge meets with a subduction zone and plate divergence at the ridge and convergence at the subduction zone continue, causing the ridge to be ...
The flat-slab subduction in northern Peru and the Norte Chico region of Chile is believed to be the result of the subduction of two buoyant aseismic ridges, the Nazca Ridge and the Juan Fernández Ridge, respectively. Around Taitao Peninsula flat-slab subduction is attributed to the subduction of the Chile Rise, a spreading ridge. [36] [37]
The subduction of the Nazca Plate resulted in the formation of the Andean Volcanic Belt and the Peru–Chile Trench.. Subduction of the eastern edge of the Nazca Plate under the western edge of the South American Plate occurs about 160 kilometers (99 mi) west of Peru and Chile, at a rate of 9 to 11 centimetres (4 in) per year at 30 degrees south latitude. [3]
The lithosphere break-up model is simulated by hydrocarbon experiments in the laboratory. [2] The researchers set up the setting of subduction zone which are analogized by hydrocarbons with different densities representing various layers in the subduction zone .