RMS-SEPM September 29th Luncheon: Deepwater Fan Giants and Mountains of Mud: A Caribbean Kaleidoscope of Ancient Seascapes and Hidden Continents

Join us in person or online as Lesli Wood, Colorado School of Mines & SEPM President presents:

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 33,000 m (100,000
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. Although its complexity has baffled
geoscientists for 100 years, new data are revealing its secrets.