Characterization of heavy minerals from active sediments of the Magdalena River basin, Colombia: Implications in the provenance analysis of the fluvial record

Abstract

The Magdalena River basin, located on the Colombian Andes, is the most important basin in the country, with an area of 257,400 km2 and altitudes between 0 to 5,670 m. The basin is characterized by having a huge variety of lithological units along an abrupt topography and intense processes of erosion and transport, generating recent sediments with a high concentration of minerals. In the present work, the heavy minerals of 21 recent sand samples from channel bars of the Magdalena River and different first and second order tributary drainages towards the east and west of the basin were analyzed. Drainage from the Central and Western Cordillera are characterized by abundant and well-preserved unstable minerals such as olivine, pyroxene, amphibole and minerals of the epidote group, that have their source areas in the different igneous and metamorphic complexes from this Cordilleras. Drainage derived in the eastern Cordillera showed a predominance of ultrastable zircon and tourmaline minerals, coming from sedimentary sequences. On the other hand, the Magdalena River is characterized by a mixed proportion of unstable, metastable and ultrastable minerals of its different tributary rivers. The results confirm that on a regional scale, heavy minerals from first and second order drainages are highly diagnostic of the geology of the source area while third order and regional scales drainages, due to their mixed nature, tend to obliterate the proportions of heavy minerals, being therefore less diagnostic in terms of provenance. Additionally, the preservation of highly unstable mineral phases in the analyzed samples, suggests that in tropical climates, the topography plays a fundamental role in the efficiency of weathering and the preservation of mineral species.