Epeirogenic uplift above a detached slab in northern Central America

Abstract

P-wave tomographic images reveal that the northern Central America highlands east of the modern volcanic arc overlie a detached slab. Hypsometric analysis of the highlands in Honduras demonstrates that the region is a dissected plateau that is disrupted by normal faults near the North American-Caribbean plate margin. The dissected Central American plateau contains a network of superimposed rivers with meanders cut into bedrock; such a geomorphic character indicates that the regional uplift occurred in the absence of tilting. We propose that the epeirogenic uplift of northern Central America is the buoyant upper-plate response to the influx of mantle asthenosphere following the breakoff and sinking of the slab.

An Evaluation of Proposed Mechanisms of Slab Flattening in Central Mexico

“…The more detailed tomographic model of HUSKER and DAVIS (2009) places the truncated edge of the slab roughly 500 km to the south of where Gorbatov and Fukao locate it, which makes the uplift mechanism less likely. Other tomographic models locate a shallower gap in the slab under northern Central America (ROGERS et al, 2002), and it is not clear how truncation of the slab at a depth of 300 km beneath Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua would relate to the model of Gorbatov and Fukao.…”

Petrogenesis of the Early Eocene adakitic rocks in the Napuri area, southern Lhasa: Partial melting of thickened lower crust during slab break-off and implications for crustal thickening in southern Tibet

“…Fourth, the slab break-off would have led to the cessation of Gangdese arc magmatism and a substantial amount of topographic uplift, similar to that of modern Central America (Rogers et al, 2002). The magmatic quiescence at ca.…”

Arc and Slab-Failure Magmatism in Cordilleran Batholiths II – The Cretaceous Peninsular Ranges Batholith of Southern and Baja California

“…The effects of slab failure are important, diverse, and may be responsible for features such as rapid uplift (Chatelain et al 1992), syncollisional magmatism (Davies and von Blanckenburg 1995;Keskin 2003;Macera et al 2008), tomographic gaps in the descending slab (Wortel and Spakman 1992), thick-skinned foreland deformation (Cloos et al 2005), seismic discontinuities (Wortel and Spakman 1992), crustal recycling (Hildebrand and Bowring 1999), transitory pulses of mafic magmatism (Ferrari 2004) doubly vergent orogens (Regard et al 2008), plateau uplift (Rodgers et al 2002), ultra-high pressure exhumation Babist et al 2006;Xu et al 2010), changes in plate motion (Austerman et al 2011); subhorizontal swarms of deep earthquakes (Chen and Brudzinski 2011), lateral shifts in foredeep sedimentation (van der Meulen et al 1998), opening of small ocean basins (Carminati et al 1998), switchover from foredeep flysch to orogenic molasse (Sinclair 1997;Wilmsen et al 2009), and porphyry copper and other mineralization (Solomon 1990;de Boorder et al 1998;Cloos et al 2005;Hildebrand 2009). …”