Downloaded from geosphere.gsapubs.
org on December 3, 2014
The Argentine Precordillera: A foreland thrust
belt proximal to the subducted plate
Richard W. Allmendinger and Phoebe A. Judge
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
ABSTRACT
The Precordillera thrust belt of west-
ern Argentina is anomalously close, both
horizontally and vertically, to the coeval
subduction zone of the Nazca plate. The
thin-skinned part of the belt has an unusu-
ally deep décollement that is well defined by
industry seismic reflection and recent broad-
band experiments. New area and line-length
balanced cross sections show that the cen-
tral Precordillera has accrued ~90 ± 21 km
of shortening since 13 Ma; much of that
shortening occurred between 12 and 9 Ma.
Fault-slip data generally show shortening
approximately west-northwest–east-south-
east, orthogonal to the traces of the thrust
and folds in the Precordillera and oblique to
the mean vector of local global positioning
system (GPS) data. The GPS strain rate is
–63 ± 9 × 10–9/yr, whereas strain rate in the
thrust belt, averaged over 13 m.y., is –56 ±
4 × 10–9/yr. Although the décollement of the
Precordillera cannot cut into Paleozoic Cuy-
ania(?) terrane basement east of the crest of
the high Andes, broadband receiver function
data show that significant crustal thicken-
ing must occur beneath and even east of the
thrust belt. We suggest that top-to-the-west
shear and thickening of the lower crust due
to flat subduction explains the distribution of
crustal thickening.
INTRODUCTION
Most retroarc foreland thrust belts, such as
the Bolivian Subandean belt or the Mesozoic–
early Cenozoic thrust belt of western North
America, are 600 km or more inland from the
coeval trench and 400–600 km above the sub-
ducted plate. This inboard position raises impor-
tant scientific questions, including the nature of
the driving mechanism of a belt so distant from
the trench, but it has a useful practical benefit:
the broad swath of hinterland allows the luxury
Geosphere; December 2014; v. 10; no. 6; p. 1203–1218; doi:10.1130/GES01062.1; 14 figures; 1 plate; 1 supplemental table.
Received 21 April 2014 ♦ Revision received 21 August 2014 ♦ Accepted 22 August 2014 ♦ Published online 30 October 2014
of constructing balanced cross sections with-
out worrying about exactly where lower crustal
shortening commences, how the transition from
upper crustal to whole crust shortening occurs,
or even how the thrust plates will restore relative
to the trench.
The Precordillera thrust belt of western
Argentina, in contrast, is located 350 km from
the Chile Trench and just 100 km above the
subducted Nazca plate. Thus the amount of
crust to work with when attempting to bal-
ance the shortening in the thrust belt is signifi-
cantly less than elsewhere, raising questions
about how and where the shortening observed
at the surface is accommodated at depth. The
first balanced section in the Precordillera (All-
mendinger et al., 1990) attempted to address
this problem. Since that time, a great deal of
new field and geophysical data (e.g., Jordan
et al., 1993, 2001; Zapata and Allmendinger,
1996a; Pardo et al., 2002; Brooks et al., 2003;
Gans et al., 2011; Judge, 2012) for the region
have become available and new structural
algorithms allow us to specify the uncertain-
ties inherent in balanced sections (Judge and
Allmendinger, 2011; Allmendinger and Judge,
2013). With a new generation of Precordillera
studies underway (e.g., Fosdick and Carrapa,
2012), it is timely to reexamine the question of
shortening in the Precordillera.
In this paper we present new field data and
balanced cross sections of the Precordillera
between lat 30°S and 30.5°S. Our fault-slip data
demonstrate that the Miocene to Holocene his-
tory of this part of the Precordillera is character-
ized by thrust faulting and shortening that devi-
ates by as much as 40° from the mean vector of
global positioning system (GPS) geodetic data.
The shortening values from balanced sections,
similar to those previously determined, yield a
yearly average strain rate that is indistinguish-
able from the GPS strain rate. The observation
that crustal thickening extends east of the defor-
mation front of the Precordillera thin-skinned
belt requires top-to-the-west simple shear and
For permission to copy, contact editing@geosociety.org
© 2014 Geological Society of America
thickening in the lower crust, much as described
by Bird (1988) for the Laramide Rocky Moun-
tain foreland of the western United States.
TECTONIC AND GEOLOGIC SETTING
The Argentine Precordillera overlies a region
of flat subduction of the Nazca plate (Cahill
and Isacks, 1992; Gans et al., 2011) located at
the southern end of the Central Andes (Fig. 1).
This region of flat subduction has been linked
to the subduction of the Juan Fernández Ridge,
which, because of a dogleg in its now sub-
ducted trace, swept southward along the South
American margin from 22 to 10 Ma. However,
since 10 Ma the segment entering the trench
is nearly parallel to the convergence direction,
resulting in a stable configuration since then
(Yáñez et al., 2002). The link between ridge
subduction and the flat geometry appears to be
supported by anomalously high frequency of
seismicity in the subducted plate aligned with
the ridge (Pardo et al., 2002; Gans et al., 2011).
Progressive enrichment of arc magmatic rocks
indicates that the main phase of shallowing of
the subducted plate occurred between 10 and
5 Ma (Kay and Abbruzzi, 1996), in broad agree-
ment with the history of subduction of the Juan
Fernández Ridge.
Study of seafloor magnetic lineations, global
plate circuits, and GPS geodesy has shown that
the convergence rate at the plate boundary has
decreased by a factor of 2 in the past 15 m.y.
(Pardo-Casas and Molnar, 1987; Somoza, 1998;
Angermann et al., 1999; Kendrick et al., 2003).
Currently, convergence is ~63 mm/yr in a direc-
tion 079.5° at the latitude of the Precordillera.
This convergence produces GPS measurable
displacements of ~10 mm/yr with respect to
stable South America in the central Precordi-
llera, which is thought to be due to elastic defor-
mation from a combination of locking of the
interplate subduction zone and locking of the
Precordillera décollement (Brooks et al., 2003).
We discuss the relationship between long-term
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Allmendinger and Judge

0 20 40 60 80 100

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Figure 1. Regional location map. Inset shows the location within South America and contours on the Wadati-Benioff zone from the SLAB
1.0 model (Hayes et al., 2012). The box shows the location of the geological map in Figure 3. The eastern Precordillera is shaded light
yellow. Locations of global positioning system (GPS) stations with velocity vectors are from Brooks et al. (2003); triangles show locations
of SIEMBRA (Sierras Pampeanas Experiment Using a Multicomponent Broadband Array) broadband stations (Gans et al., 2011). Part of
X-Line 15 of Gans et al. (2011) is shown in Figure 12.

and short-term upper crustal shortening toward
the end of this paper.
A considerable amount of geophysical and
geological information about the Precordillera
and westernmost Sierras Pampeanas is now
available (Fig. 1). Campaign-style GPS mea-
surements are available from the Central Andes
Project (Brooks et al., 2003). Early local seismol-
ogy networks focused on the region around San
Juan city in the aftermath of the 1977 Caucete
earthquake (Kadinsky-Cade et al., 1985; Smal-
ley and Isacks, 1987; Regnier et al., 1992, 1994;
Smalley et al., 1993). More recently, the region
has seen two significant broadband seismo-
graph deployments, the 2000–2002 CHARGE
(Chile-Argentina Geophysical Experiment)
(e.g., Alvarado et al., 2005) and the 2007–2009
SIEMBRA (Sierras Pampeanas Experiment
Using a Multicomponent Broadband Array)
(Gans et al., 2011). Several geological studies
have incorporated seismic reflection data from
the Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF; All-
mendinger et al., 1990; Beer et al., 1990; Zapata
and Allmendinger, 1996a, 1996b; Zapata, 1998).
Previous geological studies concentrated
on both the foreland and intermontane basin
stratigraphy and structural geology of the belt
(Furque, 1979, 1983; Ortíz and Zambrano,
1981; Ramos et al., 1984, 2002; Johnson et al.,
1986; Allmendinger et al., 1990; von Gosen,
1992, 1995; Jordan et al., 1993, 2001; Zapata
and Allmendinger, 1996a, 1996b; Siame et al.,
1997, 2002, 2005; Colombo et al., 2000;
Alvarez-Marrón et al., 2006; Vergés et al., 2007;
Fosdick and Carrapa, 2012). Perhaps most ger-
mane to the current study is the thrust timing
in the Precordillera established by Jordan et al.
(1993, 2001); they showed that the Precordil-
lera thrust belt east of the Iglesia Basin initiated
between 21 and 19 Ma with progressive east-
ward migration of the thrust front through time
and abundant evidence of simultaneous and out-
of-sequence thrust motion.
STRUCTURAL GEOLOGY OF THE
PRECORDILLERA BETWEEN
JÁCHAL AND GUALILÁN
The Precordillera thrust belt is built on a foun-
dation of a Paleozoic terrane, Cuyania, accreted
to South America prior to the start of the Jurassic

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 Downloaded from geosphere.gsapubs.org on December 3, 2014
to present Andean orogeny (Ramos et al., 1986,
2002; Ramos, 2008). The central part of the Pre-
cordillera has a layered sequence of Cambrian
to Permian strata dominated by the Cambrian–
Ordovician San Juan Limestone found at the base
of many of the thrust plates. The remainder of the
succession is composed of siliciclastic rocks.
Several low-angle unconformities within the
Paleozoic section occur throughout the belt, and
pre-Andean deformation becomes increasingly
important to the west. In the westernmost part of
the Precordillera, the Ordovician changes facies
to slope and basinal flysch with pillow basalts
and ultramafic rocks that signal the allochthonous
boundary between the Cuyania and Chilenia ter-
ranes (Ramos et al., 1986). Thrusts within these
rocks are impossible to balance due to completely
unknown initial thickness of the deposits and sig-
nificant pre-Andean folding. South of ~31°S, the
Precordillera is broken up by Triassic grabens
(Ramos and Kay, 1991), but those structures are
not present in our field area.
To the east, the eastern Precordillera is com-
posed of thick-skinned, west-verging structures
more reminiscent of the neighboring Sierras
Pampeanas (Ortíz and Zambrano, 1981; Zapata
and Allmendinger, 1996b). Deep crustal seis-
Figure 2. Digital elevation model of the study area visualized as a shaded relief block diagram with the Landsat enhanced thematic mapper
image draped over it, looking north. Principal structures of the Precordillera are shown in white. Location approximately the same as the
region depicted in Figure 3.
The Argentine Precordillera
micity beneath the eastern Precordillera con-
firms its thick-skinned nature (Smalley et al.,
1993). To the west, the Iglesia Basin (Fig. 1)
has several structures with significant strike-slip
components, including the well-known El Tigre
fault (Bastías and Bastías, 1987; Siame et al.,
1997, 2002) and local features visible on seismic
reflection data that resemble flower structures
(Alvarez-Marrón et al., 2006). As shown in the
following, strike-slip faulting is not significant
farther east. Thus, our study focuses primarily
on the thrust plates of the central Precordillera,
though we also present fault slip data and dis-
cuss GPS data from the neighboring areas.
Major Structures of the Central
Precordillera
The main thin-skinned thrusts of the Precor-
dillera between the Río Jáchal and the Cienega
de Gualilán are, from east to west (foreland to
hinterland), Niquivil, San Roque, Blanquitos,
Blanco, Caracol East, Caracol West, and Tranca
(Figs. 2 and 3). We first describe the surface
geology and structures of these thrust plates,
then address the upper crustal geometry and
shortening.
Geosphere, December 2014
Niquivil Plate
The Niquivil thrust constitutes the lead-
ing edge of the thin-skinned belt at these
latitudes and has been active for about the
past 5 m.y. (Jordan et al., 1993, 2001). The
thrust’s ongoing activity is demonstrated by
a 10–15-m-high fault scarp where its frontal
trace is crossed by the Río Jáchal at the vil-
lage of Niquivil (Fig. 4). The fault plane is
not exposed anywhere, but the probable sur-
face trace of the Niquivil thrust is ~50 km
in length. To the north, the thrust dies out
into the Cuesta de Huaco fault-propagation
fold and to the south it terminates at the Río
Francia tear fault–transfer zone. In Zapata and
Allmendinger (1996b) it was reported that the
Niquivil thrust plate is cut and deformed by
the thick-skinned fault coring the Niquivil
anticline that is just to the east, locally revers-
ing the vergence of the Cuesta de Huaco
anticline.
The base of the Niquivil thrust plate con-
tains the thickest exposures of the Ordovician
San Juan Limestone of any plate in this seg-
ment of the Precordillera. The thickness of the
remainder of the Paleozoic section is highly
variable: at Cuesta de Huaco, no Silurian
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Allmendinger and Judge

69.25°W 69.0°W 68.75°W 68.5°W

Huaco anticline
Huaco
Alluvium

Quaternary
ta de
modern alluvial fans

Rí o
A Cues

es
Cu
ancient alluvial fans

H
t a del Vie

ua
Rodeo co
Mogna

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Caracol Valley
Jáchal
nto

-30.250 °
Cara
co 30.25°S Rio Jáchal

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ticli
Quebrada del Cura

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Iglesia

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Fig. 5

in
Basin Huachipampa El Corral

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Portezuelo
Iglesia Basin clastic & Blanco Talacasto
subvolcanic igneous rocks Los Espejos
Rodeo Fm. La Chilca

-30.750 °
30.75°S
Iglesia Fm.
Mogna an

western facies eastern facies

mafic igneous
Las Flores Fm. Los Azules

Ordovician
ticline

Cienega bodies
Tertiary intrusives de Matagusanos Yerba Loca
San Juan
anticline
Gualilán San Roque
Lomas del Campanario Sierra de la
Invernada
Iglesia Group 20 km

Figure 3. Simplified geological map of the Precordillera (area shown in Fig. 1). The map was compiled based on field work (Judge, 2012),
satellite imagery interpretation, and published geological maps (Furque, 1979, 1983; Ragona et al., 1995; Furque et al., 1998; Cárdo and
Díaz, 2005). Barbs are on the upper plate of thrust faults. Fm.—formation. (Plate 1 contains a large-scale version of the map including
topographic contours and strikes and dips.)

or Devonian strata are present and the Car- San Roque Plate ~200 m of separation across the Río Francia
boniferous and Permian are unconformable The San Roque thrust trace is at least 120 km tear fault, which dies out into the San Roque
on the Ordovician. Due east of the town of long; it probably extends from the Guandacol plate. This suggests that at least some move-
Jáchal, thin remnants of Silurian Los Espejos area in the north (outside our map area) to the ment on the Niquivil thrust postdates the San
and Devonian Talacasto Formations appear Cienega de Gualilán in the south. It was active Roque thrust.
beneath the late Paleozoic unconformity. At from 10 or 9 Ma to 3 or 2 Ma (Jordan et al., The San Roque plate contains a thinner sec-
the south end of the Niquivil plate, just north 1993, 2001). The fault has a significant lateral tion of San Juan Limestone than the Niquivil
of the Río Francia, Silurian strata are present ramp just west of the village of Niquivil: to the plate. North of the Río Jáchal, the rest of the
but the Devonian section is missing (Fig. 3; north, the fault is within the San Juan Limestone lower Paleozoic section is completely missing
Plate 1). As described in the following, the but to the south it steps upsection to within the and the upper Paleozoic directly overlies the
Niquivil thrust is the only one crossed by Silurian Los Espejos Formation. Both north limestone. To the south, a thicker Silurian and
YPF seismic lines (Allmendinger et al., 1990; and south of the hanging-wall lateral ramp, the substantial Devonian section overlie the lime-
Zapata and Allmendinger, 1996b). Although footwall strata are Miocene sandstones. There stone, with a thin upper Paleozoic sequence
the fault plane is not exposed anywhere, inter- is a duplex at the base of the thrust plate, 10 km unconformably overlying the Devonian. On the
pretation of the YPF seismic lines indicates south of the lateral ramp, and a thin sliver of western flank of the San Roque range proper,
that the 35° west-dipping thrust places Ordo- Ordovician limestone is present at the base of a series of small thrusts and tight folds thicken
vician limestone over Miocene sandstone, the plate. The San Roque fault and its hanging the Silurian and Devonian section with minor
with a stratigraphic throw of 12–15 km. wall go through an 80° bend and appear to have involvement of the Carboniferous. Significant

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The Argentine Precordillera

Figure 4. Google Earth satellite image and field photo of the active fault scarp, indicated by the large white arrows, of the Niquivil thrust
just outside the village of Niquivil. The composite scarp is ~10 m high. Field photo is looking due west, from the footwall of the thrust toward
the uplifted hanging wall. Osj—Ordovician San Juan Limestone.

folding of the Devonian section is also prevalent
farther south, complicating the task of determin-
ing original stratigraphic thickness.
Blanquitos Plate
The Blanquitos plate, the shortest and most
enigmatic in this segment of the Precordillera,
underwent a brief period of activity between
11.5 and 9.5 Ma (Jordan et al., 1993, 2001). Its
surface trace is <50 km long and along most of
that length Devonian strata are at the base of the
upper plate. At 30.37°S, there is a lateral ramp
and the thrust cuts downsection northward to
include a thin sliver of San Juan Limestone at
the base of the upper plate, with Miocene sand-
stone in the lower plate. The Cerro Bayo anti-
cline (Fig. 3; Plate 1) generated by this lateral
ramp propagates across the entire upper plate
and appears to plunge beneath the Blanco thrust
to the west. Less than 10 km north from where
the limestone first appears at the base of the
upper plate, it disappears in a north-plunging
anticline. Due to extensive Quaternary cover
north of this point, it is unclear whether the anti-
cline represents a north-plunging tip-line fold
or if the fault continues northward and the fold
represents a hanging-wall lateral ramp where
the fault once again steps upsection northward
into the Silurian. There are excellent exposures
of the main thrust plane where the limestone
overlies the Tertiary on the backlimb of the San
Roque plate. The fault in these exposures has
a south to south-southwest strike and dip that
varies between 30°W and 55°W.
South of the lateral ramp, 1800–2700 m of
Devonian Punta Negra Formation are overlain
directly by a thin sequence of Cenozoic foreland
basin strata, including a distinctive eolian cross-
bedded sandstone, which overlies a redbed with
a tuff dated as 21.6 ± 0.8 Ma, found through
much of the region (Jordan et al., 1993; Milana,
1993). To the north of the lateral ramp and Cerro
Bayo anticline, the Silurian and Devonian form
a broad expanse of strata folded at multiple
wavelengths, including spectacular outcrop-
scale kink folds that can be seen on the main
road between Jáchal and the village of Rodeo in
the Iglesia Basin west of the Precordillera.
Blanco Plate
The highest relief in the region, including the
highest peak in this segment of the Precordi-
llera at more than 3600 m elevation, occurs in
the upper plate of the Blanco thrust. The Blanco
thrust was active from 13 to 9 Ma, overlapping
activity on the Blanquitos thrust (Jordan et al.,
1993, 2001). Although the Blanco thrust dies out
within our map area at ~30.3°S, it is undoubt-
edly one of most important thrust faults in the
central Precordillera and can be traced south
to the Río San Juan for a total map length of
~120 km. Throughout most of that trace length,
San Juan Limestone is found at the base of the
plate. Between the Cienega de Gualilán and the
Río Jáchal, the Blanco plate contains a tight syn-
cline in thick Silurian and Devonian strata. On

Geosphere, December 2014 1207

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2300
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12 69.25°W 69.0°W 68.75°W 68.5°W
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8 5 10 130 2014, The Argentine Precordillera: A foreland thrust belt

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Geosphere, December 2014

2400 Los Espejos
00

17
15

00
00

26
10
00
La Chilca
Silurian

00 2000

1100
27
30.75°S
-30.750 °

Fault
00

00
23
1100

29
Mogna
western facies eastern facies

00
260
0

25
El T igre
1200

mafic igneous bodies Los Azules

anticlin

00
e

32
Cienega

2400

28
00
San Juan

1900
Ma

3000
de Yerba Loca

tag

3400
52

usa
Ordovician

Gualilán San Roque

1300

n os
149

2700
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Sierra de la Invernada

ant
10

icli

2500
00

31
00
ne

2000
2000
70
0
11
1100

00
00 Map Symbols
31

Base map uses a UTM 19S projection and WGS 84 Geology compiled and reinterpreted from Furque
Fault, dotted where buried or inferred
datum. Topographic contours from 30 m ASTER (1979, 1983), Ragona and others (1995), Furque et al. 52 Strike and dip of bedding, measured in the field
digital elevation model
Scale 1 : 150,000 (1998) and Cárdo and Díaz (2005). Field work and satel-
Strike and dip of bedding, calculated from 3-point Conjugate faults of the Niquivil anticline
5 0 5 10 15 20 25 kilometers lite imagery interpretation by the authors. Field work 24
problem (not field checked)
-31.000 °

N was carried out 2007-2009 by P. A. Judge, assisted by J. Right-lateral

-69.250 ° Geologic Map of the Precordillera between-69.000 ° -68.500 °
Garroway, Rowan Gaffney, Bill Barnhart, and Rachel
contours every 20 m; index contours
-68.750 °every 100 m -68.250 ° Anticline axial trace; arrows on trace show the Left-lateral
Valletta. Allmendinger’s field work was carried out in
MN 1989-1990 and (briefly) in 2007. direction(s) of plunge of the folds

Syncline axial trace; arrows on trace show the

direction(s) of plunge of the folds
declination = 1.16°W Geologic Map of the Jáchal, Argentina, Precordillera Thrust Belt
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag-web/
by Phoebe A. Judge & Richard W. Allmendinger

Plate 1. Geologic map of the Jáchal Argentina Precordillera thrust belt study area at a scale of 1:150,000 with 20 m topographic contours, showing strikes and dips in their
proper location. To view the full-sized version of Plate 1, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/GES01062.S2 or the full-text article at www.gsapubs.org.
 Downloaded from geosphere.gsapubs.org on December 3, 2014
both limbs of the syncline, dips are steep, rang-
ing from 40° to 80°. This fold, named Mogotes
Quebraditas syncline (Fig. 3; Plate 1), is geneti-
cally related to the Blanco and the Caracol East
thrust located on the west flank of the syncline,
and its significance is discussed in the follow-
ing section.
Just north of the Cienega de Gualilán at the
Cerro Portezuelo Blanco (Fig. 3), the Blanco
thrust overrides and cuts downsection eastward
across the back limb of the Blanquitos plate.
Three-point calculations show that the fault
plane has a dip of <15°W here, whereas the
bedding in the footwall dips 30°–40°W. This
geometric relationship indicates that at least the
youngest motion on the Blanco thrust is out of
sequence and postdates the tilting of the strata in
the Blanquitos plate.
At the northern end of the Blanco plate, the
Ordovician limestone and overlying Silurian and
Devonian sequence are deformed into an over-
turned fault-propagation fold. The forelimb of
this fold is complexly imbricated with the lime-
stone thrust over the Silurian–Devonian, which
is in turn thrust over the Cenozoic of the Blanco
valley. The Blanco fault ramps into the Devonian
in the hanging wall and continues for another
8–10 km northward before dying out completely
into an anticline separating two large synclines.
The exposures of the Silurian and Devonian
along the Río Jáchal belong to the combined
upper plate of the Blanquitos and Blanco thrust.
Caracol East Thrust
The next fault to the west is an east-dipping,
west-verging structure we refer to as the Cara-
col East thrust. This structure tracks the west-
ern limb of the Mogotes Quebraditas syncline.
On the eastern side of the Caracol Valley, thin,
highly deformed slivers of San Juan Limestone
are present locally along the base of the thrust
plate. Farther south in the Cordón del Peñon
(Fig. 3) more extensive outcrops of limestone
and overlying Silurian rocks are tightly folded
into anticlines and synclines with westward ver-
gence. The upper plate of Caracol East is also
the upper plate of the Blanco thrust, and the tight
syncline between the two thrust traces suggests
that Caracol East is a back thrust off the Blanco
thrust. We hypothesize that Blanco–Caracol
East formed a triangle zone early in the history
of the thrust belt before it was subsequently
deformed and moved again out of sequence.
Caracol West and Tranca Thrust Plates
A west-dipping thrust occurs on the west side
of the Caracol Valley (Fig. 5), and it is initially
tempting to interpret the Caracol East and Cara-
col West faults as a continuous fault forming a
fenster into the lower plate (e.g., Allmendinger
The Argentine Precordillera
et al., 1990). However, the rocks of the two
upper plates are entirely different; the Caracol
East plate is dominated by Silurian and Devo-
nian strata, whereas the Caracol West plate con-
tains exposures of the Ordovician Yerba Loca
Formation, a deep-water flysch deposit. There-
fore the two faults are unlikely to be the same.
We consider the Caracol West and the Tranca
thrusts farther west to be a single en echelon
system that carries the western deep-water
facies of the Ordovician in its upper plate. The
Caracol West thrust dies out southward and
the Tranca thrust dies out northward at the Río
Jáchal with an overlap of ~22 km immediately
south of the river. Along the Río Jáchal, a few
highly deformed slivers of limestone are imbri-
cated in the Yerba Loca, but near the Cuesta del
Viento (Fig. 3; Plate 1) the Ordovician strata are
tightly deformed into pre-Andean west-verging
overturned folds associated with mafic and
ultramafic igneous rocks.
The age relations of the Caracol and Tranca
thrusts were described by Jordan et al. (1993,
2001). The Tranca thrust definitively had activity
prior to 19 Ma, and the Caracol West possibly had
activity in the same time frame. Both members
of the en echelon system also display younger
deformation; in the case of the Tranca thrust, it
is a subsidiary structure that placed ca. 21 Ma
redbeds over the Chestnut Conglomerate (Jordan
et al., 1993, 2001), and for the Caracol West, the
outcrops near the Río Jáchal show thrusting over
mid-Miocene eolian beds. In summary, initial
motion on the Tranca and Caracol West thrusts,
which carry Ordovician Yerba Loca Formation
in their upper plates, is ~6–7 m.y. older than the
other thrusts in this segment of the Precordillera.
The Blanco thrust and the more eastern thrusts
are all younger than 13 Ma.
Fault-Slip Data
Siame et al. (2005, 2006) presented fault-slip
data for the Jáchal segment of the Precordillera;
they suggested that the predominant fault popu-
lation shows approximately horizontal east-
northeast–oriented maximum principal stress,
σ1, though a secondary, and in their interpreta-
tion, older, population that records northwest-
southeast–oriented horizontal σ1. The criteria
used to separate their data into older and younger
σ1 directions are unclear. A remarkable aspect of
their data set is that the primary, younger σ1 is
not orthogonal to the strikes of the thrust faults
or the trends of the fold axes, but makes an angle
of as much as 45° to the structures, even though
there is little evidence for strike slip or oblique
slip in their data set.
Because the Siame et al. (2005, 2006) data
appear to have been collected primarily along the
Geosphere, December 2014
roads and more than 50% of their measurements
are in Paleozoic bedrock, we collected a more
extensive data set (Judge, 2012) that we know
to be completely of late Cenozoic age, as all of
our faults are located within Cenozoic strata or
on faults that place Paleozoic over Tertiary (see
the Supplemental Table1). In addition, we prefer
an analysis in terms of infinitesimal strain (Mar-
rett and Allmendinger, 1990) rather than stress.
The strain from multiple faults sets is cumulative
(additive in the case of infinitesimal deformation
and multiplicative for finite strain; Cladouhos
and Allmendinger, 1993), whereas stress is
instantaneous only, and thus one must assume
that all the faults in a data set formed at the same
time or that the same homogeneous stress state
persisted for the duration of the faulting.
We plot the P-axes and T-axes (pressure and
tension) for individual faults associated with
each major structure (Fig. 6) and summarize
each data set with a composite fault-plane solu-
tion calculated using a moment tensor sum
where all the faults are assumed to have the
same weight (Marrett and Allmendinger, 1990).
P-axes and T-axes, despite their names, are sim-
ply the infinitesimal strain axes for the faults.
In detail, individual data sets show a broad dis-
tribution of individual P-axes and T-axes, but
taken at a broader scale, two fundamental obser-
vations emerge from our fault-slip data.
First, there is very little evidence for signifi-
cant strike-slip faulting in the Neogene rocks of
the Precordillera, except for the Niquivil anti-
cline of the Eastern Precordillera (Fig. 7). Imme-
diately to the west between the Iglesia Basin and
the Precordillera, the El Tigre fault (Fig. 3) has
documented Quaternary right-lateral displace-
ment (Bastías and Bastías, 1987; Siame et al.,
1997), although this fault dies out just south of
the Río Jáchal. Thus, there must be a partition-
ing of displacements very much as described
by Siame et al. (2005). Alvarez-Marrón et al.
(2006) proposed that the thrust faulting in the
central Precordillera was Paleozoic in age and
that Neogene deformation is characterized by
minor high-angle strike-slip fault dismember-
ment of the ancient thrust belt. Our fault slip
data provide no evidence for this hypothesis;
instead they are completely consistent with
1
Supplemental Table. A tab-separated, column-
oriented text file that contains all of our fault slip
data. The Supplemental Table can be displayed in
a spreadsheet or opened and manipulated by Fault-
Kin, a freely available program for Macintosh and
Windows operating systems that can be down-
loaded from Allmendinger’s web site: http://www
.geo .cornell .edu /geology /faculty /RWA /programs
/faultkin.html. If you are viewing the PDF of this
paper or reading it offline, please visit http://dx.doi
.org/10.1130/GES01062.S1 or the full-text article on
www.gsapubs.org to view the Supplemental Table.
1209
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Allmendinger and Judge

E W

Neogene

Figure 5. Field photo of the Caracol West thrust fault in the Caracol Valley, looking south. The thrust places the (greenish) Ordovician
Yerba Loca Formation over the ca. 21 Ma Neogene redbeds. Bushes in foreground are ~1 m high. See Figure 3 (upper left of center, outlined
by white box) for location.

Neogene horizontal shortening on dip-slip
faults. Alvarez-Marrón et al. (2006) also ignored
the evidence from seismic reflection data across
the frontal thrust fault (Allmendinger et al.,
1990; Zapata and Allmendinger, 1996a, 1996b)
and seem not to have considered the possibility
that, in an imbricate stack of thrusts such as the
Precordillera, older thrusts are rotated to a high
angle by younger more eastern thrusts. Alvarez-
Marrón et al. (2006) are correct that consider-
able pre-Andean deformation in the Paleozoic
rocks of the Precordillera is indicated by numer-
ous unconformities in the Paleozoic section and
by tight folding of the Paleozoic rocks that are
unconformably beneath the Neogene strata.
The second major observation from our fault-
slip data is that shortening everywhere within
the belt is mostly orthogonal to the primary
map-scale structures (i.e., strikes of thrust faults,
trends of fold axes; Fig. 8). For example, data
from near or in the Blanquitos fault zone yield
a west-dipping nodal plane that strikes 020°, the
local strike of the thrust fault. Conjugate strike-
slip faults from the Niquivil anticline of the
eastern Precordillera (Fig. 7) yield a shortening
axis that is orthogonal to the fold axis (Figs. 6
and 8). To the south at the Río Francia tear fault,
shortening axes are anomalous with respect to
the rest of the belt, but then so is the local strike
of the Francia thrust.
Comparison to GPS Geodesy
The orthogonal shortening is important
because the strikes and trends of the structures
vary by 70° or so, even though GPS vectors
in this part of the Precordillera (Brooks et al.,
2003) have a consistent mean orientation of
075° (Figs. 1 and 8). To compare GPS data
to deformation features of the Earth’s crust,
however, one must use the gradient of the GPS
velocity field rather than the velocity field (All-
mendinger et al., 2009). We do that using the
program SSPX by Cardozo and Allmendinger
(2009) and the most recently available GPS
data for the region (Brooks et al., 2003). The
results presented here could change when the
same analyses are applied to updated data,
which are still being processed (B. Brooks,
2013, personal commun.). There are several
ways to calculate strain from GPS data (All-
mendinger et al., 2009); we use two, distance
weighting and a simpler nearest neighbor
approach, which calculates a single best-fit

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The Argentine Precordillera

D
C B
3 2

E
1
1
Huaco
Huaco
o
1
3
1

Rí o
3

H
3

ua
2
Rodeo
Rodeo 2 2
co
Jáchall
F 30.25°S
30.25°
gle
Iglesia
Ba
Basin

Niquivil
2

R í o J ác h
1
1 30
30.5°S
3

l a
Cordón de

2
l Peñon

Cerro
Portezuelo
Blanc
Blanco
3

J
H
1
30.75°S
I

Cienega
ga
de
Gualilán
69.25°W 69.0°W 20 km 68.75°W 68.5°W

Figure 6. Summary of >200 fault slip measurements, all involving Tertiary strata (Judge, 2012). The P-axes and T-axes (P—pressure,
T—tension) of individual faults are shown by the blue and red dots, respectively; the overall kinematics are indicated by the underlying
fault-plane solution (T-quadrant is shaded; same convention as used in earthquake focal mechanisms). Sites shown: A—Niquivil anticline,
B—footwall Tertiary rocks and San Roque thrust zone (does not include normal faults due to thrust load), C—Blanquitos footwall Tertiary
and thrust zone, D—Caracol Valley Tertiary and Caraco West thrust zone, E—Iglesia Valley Tertiary, F—northern Tranca Valley Tertiary
and thrust zones, G—southern Tranca Valley, H—Blanco footwall Tertiary and thrust zone, I—north side, Río Francia tear fault, J—Río
Francia thrust zone south of tear fault.

strain rate ellipse to the group of GPS stations
closest to our study area.
Regional smoothed two-dimensional (2D)
principal horizontal shortening strain-rate
axes, using a distance-weighted algorithm that
smooths out the strain-rate solution at long
wavelengths (Allmendinger et al., 2009), are
rotated ~5° clockwise from the mean GPS vec-
tor in the Jáchal Precordillera (Fig. 8). With an
orientation of 080°, the angle between GPS
shortening and the north-northeast–striking
structures in many parts of the belt is only ~60°
(Fig. 1). Because our fault-slip data sets tend to
be diverse, we could arbitrarily select subsets
of faults that will give shortening parallel to
the modern-day GPS vectors or the distance-
weighted shortening axes, but we have no objec-
tive basis for doing so.
The best-fit horizontal strain ellipse to the
eight stations nearest our studied segment of
the Precordillera, assuming that strain is homo-
geneous, yields a principal horizontal shortening
strain rate of –63 ± 9 × 10–9/yr in the direction
093° ± 8° (Fig. 8). The GPS-derived horizontal
maximum extension value is more than an order
of magnitude lower than the concomitant short-
ening, suggesting that modern-day deformation
is approximately plane strain with no significant
active strike-slip faulting in the area covered by
the GPS stations. The shortening value obtained

Geosphere, December 2014 1211

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Allmendinger and Judge

Figure 7. Google Earth image

of conjugate faults in Miocene
rocks of the Niquvil anticline
in the eastern Precordillera.
( A ) U n i n t e r p re t e d i m a g e .
(B) Interpreted image. See Fig-
ure 3 for location (right of cen-
B
ter, outlined by black box).

400 m

in this 2D calculation is essentially the same as
that yielded by a 1D transect using the stations
between PAGN and AT30, located on the Sierra
de Valle Fértil (Fig. 9).
The orientation of the 2D nearest-neighbor
GPS shortening, using just the stations clos-
est to our study area, is rotated clockwise by
nearly 20° from the mean GPS vector, a result
produced by north-south gradients in the GPS
velocity vectors. These north-south gradients
are produced in part by subduction that deviates
by ~20° from perpendicular (e.g., Bevis et al.,
2001) but are probably also due to variations in
coupling on both the subduction megathrust and
the Precordillera décollement. Nonetheless, the
GPS shortening direction is still not orthogonal
to many of the eastern structures, including the
San Roque and Niquivil thrusts and the folds

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The Argentine Precordillera

of the eastern Precordillera in the Sierras de AT17

Huaco, which have strikes or trends of 025°, 69.2°W 69.0° 68.8° 68.6° 68.4°W
and thus one would expect shortening azimuths
to be ~115° (Fig. 8). At an azimuth of 093° ± 8°,
the 2D GPS shortening rate is also not parallel to 30.2°S AT12
AT24
fault-slip shortening orientations. It is possible AT20
AT23
that more dense GPS data would better resolve
shortening directions. AT10
Assuming that GPS data are representative
Central & Western
of the present-day strain rate field, one must Precordillera
postulate that significant vertical axis rotation 30.4°
Thrust fault
has occurred since the major structures and the
Fold axial trace
minor faults we have measured formed. Cur-
rently available paleomagnetic data were col- Fault-slip shortening
lected in the Sierras de Huaco for magnetic GPS vector used in
reversal stratigraphy (Johnson et al., 1986; Beer 2D nearest neighbor
30.6° strain analysis
and Jordan, 1989; Beer, 1990) and, because
they were based on oriented cubes collected AT25 GPS vector (length =
5 mm/year)
just for polarity, are not very reliable for verti-
cal axis rotations. Thus, we await the paleomag- Horizontal shortening
direction from 2D
netic resampling of the Miocene and Pliocene regional distance
rocks of the region for final resolution of this 30.8°S weighted solution
conundrum. Best-fit strain ellipse
AT05 (highly exaggerated)
AT06 for nearest neighbor
Shortening Magnitudes from
AT03 calculation using red
Balanced Sections vectors. Dashed
0 10 20 30 40 50 km ellipses = uncertainty
The magnitude of shortening in this segment
of the Central Andes is of primary interest, given Figure 8. Summary of shortening directions from instantaneous global positioning system
its proximity to the subducted plate. We estimate (GPS) velocities and geological fault-slip data, compared to the traces of thrust faults and
horizontal shortening in two ways (Figs. 10 and folds in the Precordillera between the Río Jáchal and Río Huaco and the Cienega de Gualilán
11): the first is via classic line-length balancing (2D—two dimensional). See text for discussion.
and the second, using area balancing, allows us
to estimate the uncertainties of our calculations.
The depth to décollement is a key factor for 0.020
both types of balancing. On the east side of High Central Sierras
the belt, we use the value derived from indus- Andes Precordillera Pampeanas
Iglesia Eastern
try seismic reflection data that yields a current Basin Precordillera
depth at the eastern side of the belt of ~13.7 km
below sea level (described in Allmendinger
et al., 1990; Zapata and Allmendinger, 1996a,
Velocity (075° East), m/yr

1996b). This depth puts the décollement close to 0.015

the top of the very bright positive polarity mid- PAGN
crustal converter imaged in the receiver function AT24
stacks of Gans et al. (2011). Although this con-
verter extends east of the thrust front, we inter- AT23
pret it as the top of Cuyania basement and the
de facto décollement (Fig. 12). This converter
continues west, uninterrupted, to at least 70°W. 0.010
AT12

AT20 AT17
Figure 9. Strain rate from a one-dimensional AT10
transect of global positioning system (GPS)
stations from the Agua Negra Pass (PAGN), 63.5 ± 7 × 10–9yr –1 AT30
along the Río Jáchal to the Sierra de Valle
Fértil (AT30). Original GPS data are from 0.005
Brooks et al. (2003). Dashed lines show the 0 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000
α 95 uncertainty envelope on the slope of
the linear regression. Distance (075° East), m

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Allmendinger and Judge

San Roque
Blanquitos
Caracol W
Caracol E

Niquivil
Blanco
Tranca
A
Cenozoic 5 0 5 10 15 20
Devonian km
Silurian

Ordovician western/eastern facies

B 97 km line-length shortening

C 88 ± 22.5 km area balance shortening

uncertainty ± 22.5 km

Figure 10. Line length and area balance of section A-A′ (see Fig. 3 for location of A-A′). Stratigraphy has been simplified. Diagonal ruled
area in the deformed section at the top corresponds to the area-balanced section in the area balance at the bottom. (A) Deformed section.
Error bars show uncertainties applied to individual vertices of the deformed area polygon for use in the error analysis. Caracol E—Caracol
East (W—West). (B) Line-length restoration. (C) Area-balance restoration.

San Roque
Blanquitos
Caracol W
Caracol E

Niquivil
Blanco
Tranca
Cenozoic A
Upper Paleozoic
5 0 5 10 15 20
Devonian km
Silurian

Ordovician western/eastern facies

B 99 km line-length shortening

C 84 ± 21 km area balance shortening

uncertainty ± 21 km

Figure 11. Line-length balanced section B-B′ (see Fig. 3 for location of B-B′). Stratigraphy has been simplified. Diagonal ruled area in the
deformed section at the top corresponds to the area-balanced section in the area balance at the bottom. (A) Deformed section. Error bars
show uncertainties applied to individual vertices of the deformed area polygon. Caracol E—Caracol East (W—West). (B) Line-length res-
toration. (C) Area-balance restoration.

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The Argentine Precordillera

error is rectified here. Second, the Blanco and

Caracol East thrust are linked; we have inter-
preted them to have initially formed a triangle
zone sometime between 13 and 9 Ma. Third,
the most recent movement on the Blanco thrust
was out of sequence and younger than that on
the Blanquitos thrust, because the former locally
cuts downsection across the latter. Taking into
account point two, after the triangle zone was
formed, the Blanquitos thrust moved and then
the Blanco thrust broke through from the blind
tip of the triangle zone and cut downsection
across the Blanquitos sheet. Chronology that
is independent of the geometrical arguments
(Jordan et al., 1993, 2001) clearly permits this
interpretation.
Both balanced sections yield similar line-
length shortening values: The leading edge of
the Caracol West plate must restore to 95 km
west of its current position on A-A′ and to 99 km
Figure 12. Crustal-scale section showing how industry seismic reflection data and the bal- west on B-B′; this gives us 72% shortening on
anced section relate to first-order events on the receiver function stack (from Gans et al., A-A′ and 77% on B-B′. These large values are
2011). The strong upper mid-crustal converter is interpreted as the top of Cuyania base- similar to those obtained in Allmendinger et al.
ment and the décollement of the central Precordillera, based on its correlation with the top (1990) and fundamentally arise because the
of industry seismic data on the eastern side of the thrust belt. The receiver function data on unusually deep décollement requires a tripling
X-line 15 of Gans et al. (2011) has been foreshortened into the east-west plane of the section. of the stratigraphic section to fill the space.
The 0 datum is sea level.
Area Balance and Uncertainties

The décollement is interpreted on our sections
to be at ~16 km below sea level beneath the
Iglesia Basin. The current, unusually deep posi-
tion of the décollement reflects the magnitude of
shortening and foreland basin strata accumula-
tion; at the start of deformation the stratigraphic
level of the décollement would have been just
5–8 km deep. The low metamorphic grade of the
rocks at the base of each thrust sheet is prob-
ably indicative of this initial depth rather than
the final depth. In the western Precordillera, the
rocks in the thrust sheets are incipient green-
schist facies, though that metamorphism could
have long predated the Neogene thrusting.
Line-Length Balanced Sections
The two line-length sections (Figs. 10 and 11)
have several basic features in common. Based
on the seismic reflection data and on the array of
back-limb dips, it appears that the initial cut up
angle for the belt is steep, between 30° and 40°.
This value makes it impossible to preserve bed-
ding thickness on the forelimbs of fault-bend
folds (Suppe, 1983), but that is of little concern,
because most folds in the belt are better inter-
preted as fault-propagation folds and outcrops
show significant thinning and thickening of fold
forelimbs.
Because of pre-Andean deformation, most
stratigraphic units change thickness abruptly
from one plate to the next and even from north
to south within a single plate, as described
herein. Thus, the balancing is based on the
Cambrian–Ordovician San Juan Limestone, and
only includes from the footwall of the Niquivil
thrust to the footwall of the Caracol thrust to
the west. The Caracol West and Tranca thrust
plates cannot be balanced because the thickness
of the Yerba Loca Formation is not well known,
and these plates contain no markers of known
orientation at the start of Andean deformation
that can be correlated with the thrust plates
farther east. Because the Tranca and probably
the Caracol West plates moved several million
years before the other plates (according to the
chronology described in Jordan et al., 1993,
2001), our shortening values apply to the past
13 m.y. only.
We have no illusions that the geometries shown
in sections A-A′ and B-B′ are anything more than
plausible. Nonetheless, we note a few key geo-
metric elements. First, the easternmost Niquivil
thrust contains the thickest section of the Cam-
brian–Ordovician limestone and the décollement
is at the base of the limestone. Therefore all of
the thrusts to the west should have hanging-wall
ramps at depth across the unexposed parts of the
section producing thickening in the subsurface;
this helps to fill the space down to the unusually
deep décollement. This geometry was not rec-
ognized in Allmendinger et al. (1990) and that
To carry out the area balance we use meth-
ods that allow us to assess uncertainties (Bird,
1988; Judge and Allmendinger, 2011). The bal-
anced polygons with their error bars are shown
in Figures 10 and 11. We use a uniform initial
stratigraphic wedge of just Ordovician strata
because the stratigraphy of the Precordillera is
not sufficiently well known to allow us to define
a nonuniform taper. The greatest unknowns are
the horizontal position of the western edge of
the deformed polygon on the décollement (we
somewhat arbitrarily assign ±5 km to that point)
and the thickness of the Ordovician Invernada
and Yerba Loca Formations on the west side of
the initial wedge. We assign an uncertainty of
25% of the thickness, although this is admit-
tedly little more than a guess. We report Gauss-
ian errors, based on the square root of the sum of
the squares, in the following analysis; maximum
errors are much larger (Taylor, 1997; Bevington
and Robinson, 2003).
Determination of shortening magnitude and
percent depends on the relationship between
the deformed polygon and the initial wedge. To
make our area balance as close as possible to our
line-length balance, we use the same deformed
width. Thus, cross-section A-A′ has a shorten-
ing magnitude of 88 ± 22.5 km and a shorten-
ing of 71% ± 5.4%, very close to the line-length
balance of that section. Section B-B′ yields
a shortening magnitude of 84 ± 21 km and a

Geosphere, December 2014 1215

 Downloaded from geosphere.gsapubs.org on December 3, 2014

Allmendinger and Judge

shortening of 73% ± 5%. The line-length short- Central & Western Precordillera
ening for B-B′ is within the error limits from the

os

e
qu
uit
area balance.

il
ol

Ro
nco
nca

uiv
nq
rac
If we assume that the central Precordillera

San

Niq
Bla
Bla
Tra

Ca
thrusts balanced here were active for the past 0
13 m.y., then the yearly average strain rate is AA′ Shortening Rate
BB′ Shortening Rate
56 ± 4 × 10–9/yr; recall that the 2D GPS strain 2
calculation gives 63 ± 9 × 10–9/yr over the geo-
logically instantaneous time span of a decade. 4
Thus, we can say that the rate of strain accu-
6
mulation today in the Precordillera matches the
average rate of strain accumulation over the past 8
Time (Ma)
13 m.y. In detail, of course, over geological time
the shortening rate (Fig. 13), and thus the strain 10
rate, is not constant. Furthermore, the GPS strain
is thought to be due to elastic deformation due to
12
locking of both the subduction zone and locking 14
of the Precordillera décollement (Brooks et al.,
2003). Given the 50% decrease in plate conver- 16 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
gence rate over the past 15 m.y. (Kendrick et al.,
18 Shortening Rate (km/Ma or mm/yr)
2003), the instantaneous strain rate has probably
not been constant. Our result, though, suggests 20
that elastic strain that accumulates in the Pre-
cordillera ultimately stays in the Precordillera 22
when it is converted into permanent deforma-
tion across numerous earthquake cycles. Figure 13. Thrust duration in the central and western Precordillera (after Jordan et al.,
2001) and shortening rate through time based on the balanced sections presented here. The
CRUSTAL SHORTENING OF THE spike in shortening at 12–9 Ma is due to simultaneous motion on Blanco, Blanquitos, and
ANDEAN FORELAND AT 30°S San Roque thrusts.

The cross-section balancing demonstrates

that the décollement of the thrust belt continues
westward at least ~115 ± 21 km from the thrust
front of the central Precordillera without involv-
ing basement, a position beneath or west of the
crest of the high Andes (Fig. 12). This raises a
space problem because, at the west end of the
décollement, the South American crust is already
thinning toward the anomalously close plate
boundary and no obvious structural geometry
exists for transferring the upper crustal shorten-
ing into lower crustal thickening. Furthermore,
broadband geophysical experiments (Gans et al.,
2011) show that the thickest crust in this seg-
ment is not underneath the high topography,
but instead is beneath the western margin of the
Iglesia Basin. The crust is >60 km thick east of
the deformation front of the thin-skinned thrust
belt. How does the substantial surface shortening
in the Argentine Precordillera produce shorten-
ing and thickening at deeper levels in the crust?
Allmendinger et al. (1990) noted the same
problem: with much poorer data, they attempted
some fanciful geometries (triangles zones and
duplexes) to solve the problem. Here we do not
attempt to provide specific structural geometries,
as even today’s data are not sufficient to define
the lower crustal deformation style. Instead, the
simplified deformation across this segment of
the Andes can be visualized as three schematic,
horizontal particle velocity profiles depicting
the coeval flow of rocks in different parts of the
belt (Fig. 14). The weak lower crust is probably
advected eastward during flat subduction, much
as described by Bird (1988) for the Laramide
deformation of the western United States. Con-
ceivably, part of the lower crustal material could
be tectonically eroded from the leading edge of
South America (Goss et al., 2013).
In all three of our particle velocity profiles,
the strong mantle lid is simply translated east-
ward (Bird, 1988). The eastward flow of the
lowermost crust diminishes gradually eastward
but extends well into the Sierras Pampeanas.
Beneath the Precordillera, the middle crust
under the décollement has a velocity close to
zero with respect to South America. Beneath the
High Andes, the crust near the western end of
the décollement probably behaves more like a
ductile shear zone than a discontinuity, and the
middle crust below has some finite eastward
velocity. The horizontal velocity gradient in the
middle crust between the high Andes and the
Precordillera produces shortening in the middle
crust but not at the surface. In the western veloc-
ity profile beneath the Miocene forearc (there is
no arc in this segment of the Andes today), there
is no difference in horizontal velocity between
the upper and middle crust; because there is a
velocity gradient in the middle crust between
western and central velocity profiles, there must
be middle crustal shortening there as well.
These schematic horizontal velocity pro-
files are, of course, oversimplified; they do not
address shortening in the Sierras Pampeanas,
strike slip along the El Tigre fault, or forearc
deformation. Nonetheless they explain, to a first
approximation, the patterns of crustal thicken-
ing and surface deformation that are observed in
the Andes at lat ~30°S.
The crustal deformation scenario proposed
for this segment of the Andes may have broader
application. Kley and Monaldi (1998) docu-
mented a deficit of surface shortening in the
retroarc thrust belts relative to the crustal thick-
ness throughout much of the Central Andes.
Translation of lower crustal material eastward,
perhaps linked to subduction erosion, could
account for at least some of this deficit, although
the mechanical model proposed by Bird (1988)
is only applicable to flat subduction regimes
such as exist beneath the Precordillera.
CONCLUSIONS
Horizontal shortening in the Argentine Pre-
cordillera over the past 13 m.y. is ~86 ± 22 km,
or ~72% ± 5%. The line-length balances of two

1216 Geosphere, December 2014

 Downloaded from geosphere.gsapubs.org on December 3, 2014
nch
W tre
rn
de
mo
South American
crust
ocea
Figure 14. Schematic diagram showing postulated geological horizontal velocity profiles in the Central Andes at lat 30°S. Crustal thickness
and location of the top of the subducted oceanic slab are from Gans et al. (2011). The 0 datum is sea level.
parallel sections across the belt are also within
this range. The average yearly strain rate for this
deformation is 56 ± 4 × 10–9/yr, although the
temporal history of motion (Jordan et al., 1993,
2001) in this segment of the Precordillera shows
that this strain rate must have varied with time.
Nonetheless, the average value is indistinguish-
able from the 1D and 2D strain rates across the
Precordillera calculated from available geodetic
GPS data (Brooks et al., 2003), which give us
63 ± 8 × 10–9/yr. Although the GPS strain rate
is undoubtedly mostly elastic due to loading of
the locked décollement and the locked subduc-
tion megathrust, it appears that the contempo-
rary strain in the Precordillera will be converted
into permanent deformation in the Precordillera
by future earthquakes. The nonorthogonal-
ity between GPS mean vector orientation and
geological shortening is in part related to north-
south gradients in the vector field producing a
rotation of the infinitesimal strain ellipse, but
probably also to some component of permanent
vertical axis rotation over geologic time.
The décollement of the Precordillera is well
identified by industry seismic reflection data at
the eastern limit of the belt, and its westward
projection coincides with the high-amplitude
middle and/or upper crustal event on the receiver
function stacks given by Gans et al. (2011). This
event is probably the top of Cuyania basement
rocks, and the décollement is at that interface, as
there is no outcrop evidence that Cuyania base-
ment is involved in Precordillera thrusting. The
The Argentine Precordillera
arc n de
ore hA
e F H ig
n
oce
Mi
translation
shortening
top-to-W shear &
top-to-W shear &
shortening
nic c
rust
broadband seismic data and balanced sections
show that the Precordillera décollement projects
westward beneath the high Andes (Fig. 12), just
220 km horizontally and 80 km vertically from
the plate boundary. This result, combined with
the well-imaged Moho, shows that lower crustal
thickening also occurs beneath the thin-skinned
thrust belt. We suggest that lower crustal flow
similar to that proposed by Bird (1988) for the
Laramide Rocky Mountains is responsible for
the crustal thickening pattern beneath this seg-
ment of the Andes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Judge is grateful to field assistants Jordan Garro-
way, Rowan Gaffney, Bill Barnhart, and Rachel
Valletta for thoughtful field conversations and good
company while collecting field data. We thank our col-
leagues Chris Andronicos, Terry Jordan, Laura Giam-
biagi, Greg Hoke, Sue Kay, and Manfred Strecker for
many fruitful discussions and field visits, and Susan
Beck for providing a high-resolution version of the
receiver function data for inclusion in Figure 12. We
are grateful to Peter DeCelles and Raymond Russo for
very helpful critical reviews of the manuscript. This
research was supported by National Science Founda-
tion grant EAR-0510785.
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 Downloaded from geosphere.gsapubs.org on December 3, 2014

Geosphere

The Argentine Precordillera: A foreland thrust belt proximal to the subducted

plate
Richard W. Allmendinger and Phoebe A. Judge

Geosphere 2014;10;1203-1218
doi: 10.1130/GES01062.1

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