Cabo de La Vela (“La Vela” Cape) and Surroundings

Abstract

The Cabo de la Vela is located in the Guajira peninsula, in the northernmost Colombia and NE from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal massif in the world (5775 m). It lies in the southern border of the Caribbean tectonic plate, where the relative movement of the plate was responsible for the generation, rotation, and translation of basins and tectonic blocks north of Colombia ; one of these blocks is the Jepirra Ridge, to which the La Vela Cape belongs. Before the Campanian, a subduction zone may have formed together with an intra-oceanic arc, represented now by the La Vela Cape ; it became a back-arc and then an arc toward the end of Campanian (~74 Ma), when ultramafic rocks, gabbros, and andesitic dykes formed and were exhumed. From a structural and geomorphological standpoint, the Guajira consists of a broad coastal plain, interrupted north of the Oca and Cuisa Faults by isolated ridges. This results from the evolution of a marine platform, which, from the end of Oligocene to the Pliocene, was flat and stable, interrupted only by islands formed by the Jarara, Macuira, Cosinas, and Carpintero (including Jepirra) Ridges. As a result of Quaternary morphodynamic processes active on the emerged terraces, the great plain gave rise to the present erosional and depositional landforms, which are still under the influence of active processes.