Abstract

The offshore South Caribbean deformed belt (SCDB) is a 100-km-wide (62 mi), late Cenozoic sedimentary accretionary prism formed where the Caribbean plate is obliquely subducted beneath northern South America. Progradation of deltaic deposits of the 1500-km-long (932 mi) Magdalena River over the SCDB and tectonic deformation of the deltaic sedimentary rocks has created one of the youngest (last 10 Ma) and thickest (5–18 km [3–5 mi]) accretionary prisms in the world. We use three types of data (deep-penetration, seismic-reflection profiles, gravity modeling collinear with the seismic lines, and structural restorations) to describe the late Miocene to Recent thrust kinematics of the 10- to 18-km-thick (6.2–11.1 mi) SCDB formed above the subducting Caribbean Oceanic Plateau whose crust varies in thickness from 17 km (10.6 mi) in the southern part of the 180-km-long (111 mi) study area to 8 km (4.9 mi) in the north. In the southern area of thicker subducted plateau crust, the structural style is characterized by Neogene growth strata defining a major thrusted sequence that is backthrust in a landward direction, deformed by reactivation of preexisting faults as out-of-sequence thrust (OOST) faults, common shale diapirism, and active, margin-parallel strike-slip faults that accommodate the oblique-slip component of subduction. In the northern area of thinner oceanic crust (6–8 km [3.7–4.9 mi]), the structural style includes seaward-verging, imbricated thrust fans with less prominent backthrusting and strike-slip faulting, and more prominent shale diapirism. Proposed controls for the observed structural differences between the northern and southern areas include (1) more buoyancy of the subducted plate in the southern area due to its greater crustal thickness, and (2) the presence of more overpressured and ductile deformed shale layers with associated shale diapirs in the north.