Vestiges of an Ordovician west-vergent thin-skinned Ocloyic thrust belt in the Argentine Precordillera, southern Central Andes

Abstract

Collision of the down-going, Laurentia-derived Argentine Precordillera terrane with the Gondwanan margin drove the Ordovician Ocloyic orogeny, including subduction volcanism, metamorphism, and top-to-west shearing east of the Precordillera. In the Precordillera, above passive-margin carbonates (Lower Ordovician San Juan Limestone and older carbonates), a Middle to Upper Ordovician westward-prograding synorogenic clastic wedge of black shale (Gualcamayo Shale) and coarser clastic sediment (Las Vacas Conglomerate and Trapiche Formation) fills a peripheral foreland basin. New research has identified vestiges of a west-directed thin-skinned Ocloyic foreland thrust belt that has been fragmented by east-directed Andean thrusting. The El Corral thrust sheet, with hanging-wall detachment in the San Juan Limestone, extends over a west-directed footwall frontal ramp and extensive flat to low-angle footwall cutoff in the Gualcamayo and Las Vacas formations. Las Vacas conglomerates in the footwall include olistoliths (10-m scale) exclusively of San Juan Limestone and Gualcamayo Shale; the beds in some olistoliths are folded. The advancing El Corral thrust sheet successively supplied and overrode the stratigraphically restricted olistoliths. In the El Corral footwall, tight west-vergent folds and faults within an anticlinorium in the San Juan Limestone and Gualcamayo Shale suggest a deeper (unexposed) thrust fault, the Los Celestitos fault. West of the anticlinorium, easterly dip (restored to remove Andean deformation) beneath an angular unconformity between Las Vacas and Trapiche beds is consistent geometrically with the trailing limb of a west-vergent fault-propagation anticline in the hanging wall of the subsurface Los Celestitos fault. The same angular unconformity truncates the El Corral fault and hanging-wall strata. In the Trapiche Formation, contrasting sedimentary facies from sandy turbidites westward to limestone-clast megabeds and olistoliths suggest another frontal ramp from a stratigraphically deeper detachment in a break-forward sequence. None of these observations separately defines an Ocloyic thrust belt. Taken together, however, these vestiges of thrust-belt style indicate the consistent geometry of an Ordovician west-vergent thin-skinned Ocloyic thrust belt.