The Central Andean orogeny is caused by the subduction of the Nazca oceanic plate beneath the South-American continental plate. In Particular, the Southern Central Andes (SCA, 27°-40°S) are characterized by a strong N-S and E-W variation in the crustal deformation style and intensity. Despite being the surface geology relatively well known, the information on the deep structure of the upper plate in terms of its thickness and density configurations is still scarcely constrained. Previous seismic studies have focused on the crustal structure of the northern part of the SCA (~27°-33°S) based upon 2D cross-sections, while 3D crustal models centred on the South-American or the Nazca Plate have been published with lower resolution.
To gain insight into the present-day state of the lithosphere in the area, we derived a 3D model that is consistent with both the available geological and seismic data and with the observed gravity field. The model consists on a continental plate with sediments, a two-layer crust and the lithospheric mantle being subducted by an oceanic plate. The model extension covers an area of 700 km x 1100 km, including the orogen, the forearc and the forelands.
We are providing the geophysical data used to develop a gravity validated 3D lithospheric configuration of the Caribbean and north South American plates. The sources of these data are described in Section 4 of this README. Republication of subsets of these data are with permission of the authors or allowed by the licences of the input data.
This data repository contains the lithospheric layers of the gravity validated 3D structural and density model of the Caribbean and north South American plates. In this model, the integration of different publicly available geophysical datasets was made, after an interpolation to a homogeneous spatial resolution of 25 km was performed. The data repository also contains the average density of the crystalline crust obtained after forward modelling the gravity anomalies. Additionally, the rotation files of the GPlates reconstructions of the Caribbean Large Igneous Plateau (CLIP) back to 90 Ma are included. This kinematic analysis was based on different reconstructions previously published by other authors. Further information and citations are given on the README file associated to this data repository.
The scripts and workflow are supplementary material to "3D Modelling of Vertical Gravity Gradients and the delimitation of tectonic boundaries: The Caribbean oceanic domain as a case study" (Gómez-García et al., 2019).The codes include the calculation of the VGG response of a 3D lithospheric model, in spherical coordinates, using the software Tesseroids (Uieda, 2016). The "Readme_Workflow_2019_002.pdf" file provide very detail information about the structure of this repository, as well as the step-by-step for the scripts execution, and the list of the requiered software for the correct workflow performance.All the information provided here will allow the user to reproduce the results and figures of the main paper. Detailed information are also given in the associated README.
These data are supplementary material to "3D Modelling of Vertical Gravity Gradients and the delimitation of tectonic boundaries: The Caribbean oceanic domain as a case study" (Gómez-García et al., 2019).This dataset contains information about the structure of the Caribbean oceanic crust, based on the modelling of the Vertical Gravity Gradients, which are gravity derivatives especially sensitive to density contrasts in the upper layers of the Earth.The files included are:1) The inferred densities of the Caribbean crystalline crust, in the file “CrustalDensities.txt”.2) The residuals of the Vertical Gravity Gradients (VGG), in the file “ResidualsVGG.txt”, which were used to define the terrain boundaries.3) A collection of shapefiles (2019GC008340_Gdb.gdb) with the main inferred tectonic/terrain boundaries and additional geologic features.4) A "Read me" file with the description of the different shapefiles available in the geodatabase.