The structure of the Oriental Cordillera of Dominican Republic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21701/bolgeomin.118.2.007Keywords:
Caribbean Plate, island-arc, strike-slip, transpressionAbstract
The Oriental Cordillera of Dominican Republic is a mildly deformed area next to the north-eastern Caribbean plate boundary. Recent geological mapping of the cordillera reject the older ‘terrane’ subdivision, showing instead a coherent antiformal structure cored by Early Cretaceous island-arc rocks and covered by Late Cretaceous layered fore-arc sediments. The antiform is cut as a positive flower structure by late NW-SE strike-slip faults with sinistral movement (the main is the Yabón fault), that splay from the principal displacement zone of Samaná. Shear bands adjacent to the Yabón fault contains en echelon folds with sigmoidal deformation and a fan arrangement of the hinge lines recording the progressive rotation of the folds towards the fault. The superposition of these folds to the previous antiformal folding produce dome and basin interference patterns. The structure at the easternmost part of the cordillera is a linked system of strikeslip faults, folds and pop-ups, with changes of the transverse profile along-strike, some folds are cut as half-anticlines and half-synclines by Riedel shears. Five small trastensional basins formed in the Paleogene by crustal thinning at the left stepovers and bends of the strike- slip faults, favouring the protrusion of ultrabasic rocks to the surface along the Yabón fault. The structural pattern of the cordillera has been used qualitatively to interpret the orientation of the principal strain axes in different times and the modes of deformation. We conclude that homogeneous contractional deformation in the upper Cretaceous changed to partitioned transpression in the Paleocene, in consonance with a diminution in the convergence angle between the Caribbean and North American plates. These results are in agreement with the decrease of arc volcanism in La Hispaniola and the age of the first structures formed in the Caiman trough.
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