Volcanic Blanket Reveals Development of Central Andes

South American 'Pompeii': Volcanic eruption 22 million years ago preserved a snapshot of the Andes forming

An enormous volcanic eruption buried a snapshot of the baby Andes mountains, revealing a slow-and-steady growth rate.

Volcanic Blanket Reveals Development of Central Andes

The geologic history of the Central Andes is typically a story of erasure, where wind and water strip away evidence of how mountains actually grow. However, a massive volcanic event 22 million years ago created a rare physical archive on the western slopes of the range. The eruption of the Lauca caldera released over 1,260 cubic kilometers of gas, ash, and debris, depositing a layer of ignimbrite up to one kilometer thick. This volcanic blanket …

A volcanic sheet that buried a whole mountain landscape in northern Chile 21.9 million years ago has a top flat enough to put a ceiling on how fast rock in that part of the Andes was being pushed up before the eruption

A flat-topped volcanic sheet holds clues to how fast ancient mountains were rising—and suggests the Andes grew slower than once thought.

The Andes grew slowly and steadily over tens of millions of years

A giant volcanic eruption acted a little like Vesuvius, but across an entire landscape in the Andes, burying the terrain beneath it and preserving information that would otherwise have been lost to erosion and deformation. Recently, the researchers looked at this vast expanse of volcanic rock that erupted from the Lauca Caldera in northern Chile […]

A giant Pompeii-scale eruption buried an ancient Andes landscape and preserved it for 22 million years

An enormous Chilean eruption buried an ancient landscape whose shape now reveals how quickly the Andes were rising before disaster struck.