Thermochronometric ages of outcropping units, retrieved in modern river sand, imply a very recent (< 2 Ma) pulse of exhumation, possibly triggered by removal of lower crust, whose precise magnitudes and time constraints remain unknown. Frederic Edwin Church, like his fellow Hudson River school artists, traveled widely, especially to the American West and South America. In contrast, diminished exhumation prompted a reciprocal stratigraphic pattern in the northern margin, where facies retrograde, leading to accumulation of shallow marine facies onto fan delta and alluvial fan deposits. 40 1/16 x 60 1/8 'Bequest of Charles Parsons, 1905. On the southwestern margin, moderate to rapid exhumation favored progradation of alluvial fan deposits on top of underlying shallow marine and fan delta facies. Multiple approaches to extracting exhumation rates from thermochronometry, including 1D and 3D reconstructions, reveal that following rapid Late Eocene-early Miocene rock uplift, asymmetric exhumation characterized the Sierra Nevada. Questa maestosa catena montuosa è la catena montuosa costiera più alta del mondo, con le cime innevate Simón Bolívar e Cristóbal Colón che si innalzano a 18.700 piedi sul livello del mare. This episode marked the onset of contrasting exhumation histories, characterized by low denudation and pediment-formation in the Central Cordillera, as opposed to rapid, episodic exhumation of the Santa Marta massif, associated with normal faulting and opening of extensional basins along its southwestern margin. Il Parco Nazionale della Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta è un ecosistema naturale unico lungo la costa settentrionale della Colombia.

Subsequent late Eocene (~35Ma) dismembering of both ranges occurred in association with right lateral translation of the Caribbean Plate against the northwestern continental margin of Colombia. Paleocene initial collision of oceanic crust along western Colombia triggered initial exhumation and westward monoclinal tilting of the formerly contiguous Central Cordillera and the Santa Marta massif. A compilation of sparse bedrock and detrital low-temperature thermochronometric data, new detrital apatite fission-track and apatite (U-Th)/He data from modern river sediment and Neogene strata, and the stratigraphic patterns of adjacent Miocene-Pliocene basins document an episodic tectonic development of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. With an average elevation of ~4 km and peaks up to ~5.8 km-high, this small mountain range lie only 85 km to the south of an abyssal plain ~3.5 km deep in the Caribbean Sea.

The highest coastal relief on Earth occurs in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia.

Sierra nevada de santa marta