Published 1995 as part of Memoir 62
Copyright © 1995 The American Association of Petroleum Geologists.   All Rights Reserved.

Industry reflection seismic profiles from the northern part of the Oriente basin display families of basement-rooted structures ranging in age from early Mesozoic (and possibly Permian) to Quaternary. We interpret the Mesozoic-Cenozoic structures to be kinematically and chronologically compatible with tectonic events displayed in the contiguous Andean Cordillera. Late Triassic (and Permian?) extensional structures may have been linked to an intra-Cordilleran rift regime. Widely developed Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous convergent structures are coeval with transpression along the western margin of the South American plate. Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic convergent structures are responses to major episodes of plate marginal terrane accretion and plate convergence. Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic phases of structuring are displayed on seismic profiles as a network of steeply dipping northward-trending faults that have risen from Precambrian crystalline basement into the Phanerozoic cover rocks. Northward-elongated sharply hinged folds generated in cover rocks by slip on basement faults are traps for Oriente basin oil fields.