Deepwater Fan Giants and Mountains of Mud: A Caribbean Kaleidoscope of Ancient Seascapes and Hidden Continents

Lesli Wood, Colorado School of Mines, USA

The southeastern Caribbean Margin has been tectonically active throughout much of the Miocene to present with the Caribbean plate obducting the Atlantic plate to the east and obliquely colliding with the South American plate to the south. Mix in two of the largest continent-draining river systems in the world; the Orinoco and the Amazon Rivers, and you have huge sedimentation rates over-filling the basin, generating enormous mass failure, and over-pressuring the subsurface to build mountain of mud on the seafloor. All of these elements interact to produce an area of the world that is likely the most sedimentologically dynamic of anywhere on Earth. A mega-merge of ~50,000 sq km of 3D seismic data, some of which reaches nearly 20,000 m (60,000 feet) deep, is enabling us to view the seismic geomorphologic evolution of this enigmatic and energy rich province as never before. Extensional faults, mobile mud withdrawal and transtensional pull-apart processes produce enormous amounts of accommodation. This accommodation has been filled for the past 15 million years by deltaic progradation, tectonic-activity and over-accumulation triggered mass failures, and alongshore-current transported sediments. This talk will visit the processes and deposits of a basin that does not play by passive margin rules. Where leveed channels weave their way 250 km basinward through extremely complex and enormous seafloor topography to deposit in the Orinoco Fan. This region holds the entire post-Cretaceous history of the northern South American continent and new explorers are now reaching beneath the decollement of the plates (!) to search for Cretaceous age turbidite reservoirs.