Abstract
Along the western margin of South America, plate convergence is accommodated by slip on the subduction interface and deformation of the overriding continent1,2,3,4,5,6. In Chile1,2,3,4, Bolivia6, Ecuador and Colombia5,7, continental deformation occurs mostly through the motion of discrete domains, hundreds to thousands of kilometres in scale. These continental slivers are wedged between the Nazca and stable South American plates. Here we use geodetic data to identify another large continental sliver in Peru that is about 300–400 km wide and 1,500 km long, which we call the Inca Sliver. We show that movement of the slivers parallel to the subduction trench is controlled by the obliquity of plate convergence and is linked to prominent features of the Andes Mountains. For example, the Altiplano is located at the boundary of converging slivers at the concave bend of the central Andes, and the extending Gulf of Guayaquil is located at the boundary of diverging slivers at the convex bend of the northern Andes. Motion of a few large continental slivers therefore controls the present-day deformation of nearly the entire Andes mountain range. We also show that a 1,000-km-long section of the plate interface in northern Peru and southern Ecuador slips predominantly aseismically, a behaviour that contrasts with the highly seismic neighbouring segments. The primary characteristics of this low-coupled segment are shared by ∼20% of the subduction zones in the eastern Pacific Rim.
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Change history
30 July 2014
The authors omitted to cite two papers31, 32 that suggest active fault systems in northwest South America are partly controlled by the obliquity of convergence between the subducting Nazca oceanic plate and South America, as well as two papers33, 34 that discuss aspects of active crustal fault maps from the northern Andes.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been financially supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR; contract number ANR-07-BLAN-0143-01) and has continuously been supported by the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). We acknowledge additional support from the Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT, Ecuador), the European Commission (DIPECHO project) and the CNRS-INSU. This work has been carried out in the frame of the Joint International Laboratory ‘Seismes & Volcans dans les Andes du Nord’.
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J.M.N. designed the study and did field work, GPS processing, modelling and wrote the paper. J.C.V.L. did field work, GPS processing, modelling and edited the paper. M.C. did modelling and edited the paper. P.A.M. did field work, GPS processing and edited the paper. F.R. did field work and edited the paper. P.J. and D.C. did field work and GPS processing. M.C., P.A.M., F.R., P.J. and D.C. equally contributed to the work. A.A. edited the paper. L.M., Y.F., M.R., M.V. and C.B. did field work and edited the paper. T.T. did GPS analysis. J.M.M.M. and W.M. managed the GPS data for Peru and Colombia. F.B. and X.M. did field work. H.T. helped with logistics. H.Y. helped with logistics and edited the paper.
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Nocquet, JM., Villegas-Lanza, J., Chlieh, M. et al. Motion of continental slivers and creeping subduction in the northern Andes. Nature Geosci 7, 287–291 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2099
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2099
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