The Bogotá Fault ( es, Falla de Bogotá) is a major inactive slightly dextral oblique

thrust fault A thrust fault is a break in the Earth's crust, across which older rocks are pushed above younger rocks. Thrust geometry and nomenclature Reverse faults A thrust fault is a type of reverse fault that has a dip of 45 degrees or less. If ...

in the

department Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...

of Cundinamarca in central

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

. The fault has a total length of , while other authors designate a length of , and runs along an average north-northeast to south-southwest

strike Strike may refer to: People *Strike (surname) Physical confrontation or removal *Strike (attack), attack with an inanimate object or a part of the human body intended to cause harm *Airstrike, military strike by air forces on either a suspected ...

of 013.5 ± 7 across the

Altiplano Cundiboyacense The Altiplano Cundiboyacense () is a high plateau located in the Eastern Cordillera of the Colombian Andes covering parts of the departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. The altiplano corresponds to the ancient territory of the Muisca. The Alti ...

, central part of the

Eastern Ranges The Eastern Ranges is an Australian rules football team in the NAB League, the Victorian statewide under-18s competition. The club is a founding member of the competition (1992) and has produced several players for the Australian Football Leagu ...

of the Colombian

Andes The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long, wide (widest between 18°S – 20°S ...

. The fault stretches from the

Gallo River The Gallo is a river in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula, a right-bank tributary of the Tagus. It joins the Tagus in the latter's upper course. It has its source in the Sierra del Tremedal, close to the municipality of Orihuela del Tremedal (pr ...

at the

Sumapaz Páramo Sumapaz Páramo (Spanish: ''Páramo de Sumapaz'' - meaning "Utterly peaceful moorland" ) is a large páramo ecosystem located in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense mountain range, considered the largest páramo ecosystem in the world. It was de ...

in the south to the

Teusacá River The Teusacá River is a river in the Eastern Hills of Bogotá and on the Bogotá savanna. It is a left tributary of the Bogotá River, Colombia. The river of long originates at an elevation of at the Alto Los Tunjos, Santa Fe, and flows northw ...

in the north and borders the

Bogotá savanna The Bogotá savanna is a montane savanna, located in the southwestern part of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in the center of Colombia. The Bogotá savanna has an extent of and an average altitude of . The savanna is situated in the Eastern Range ...

and the Colombian capital to the east. The Bogotá Fault formed the pronounced Eastern Hills, with the well-known

Monserrate Monserrate (named after Catalan homonym mountain ''Montserrat'') is a high mountain over 10,000 feet high that dominates the city center of Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. It rises to above the sea level, where there is a church (built in ...

and

Guadalupe Hill Guadalupe Hill is a high hill located in the Eastern Hills, uphill from the centre of Bogotá, Colombia. Together with its neighbouring hill Monserrate it is one of the landmarks of Bogotá. At the top of the hill a hermitage and a high statue ...

s, east of the Colombian capital. The brecciated fault zone is exposed along the road from Bogotá to La Calera and a vertical displacement of at least has been determined. The

hanging wall In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

of the reverse fault contains the

Late Cretaceous The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the younger of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after ''creta'', the ...

Chipaque Formation The Chipaque Formation ( es, Formación Chipaque, K2cp, Kc) is a geological formation of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes. The formation is also described as Gachetá Formation, named after Gachetá, in the area o ...

and

Guadalupe Group The Guadalupe Group ( es, Grupo Guadalupe, K2G, Ksg) is a geological group of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes. The group, a sequence of shales and sandstones, is subdivided into three formations; Arenisca Dur ...

and the

footwall In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

consists of the

Paleogene The Paleogene ( ; British English, also spelled Palaeogene or Palæogene; informally Lower Tertiary or Early Tertiary) is a geologic period, geologic period and system that spans 43 million years from the end of the Cretaceous Period million yea ...

and

Neogene The Neogene ( ), informally Upper Tertiary or Late Tertiary, is a geologic period and system that spans 20.45 million years from the end of the Paleogene Period million years ago ( Mya) to the beginning of the present Quaternary Period Mya. ...

Guaduas Guaduas () is a town in Colombia, in the Lower Magdalena Province department of Cundinamarca, about 117 km from Bogotá. It is an agricultural and tourist center of some importance with a population of about 41,000. Its name refers to a ...

Cacho Cacho may refer to: Dice Games * Cacho Alalay, a South American dice game popular in Bolivia * Dudo, a South American dice game popular in Chile, also known as Pico or Perudo Geology * Cacho Formation, a geological formation in the Colombian A ...

and

Bogotá Formation The Bogotá Formation ( es, Formación Bogotá, E1-2b, Tpb, Pgb) is a geological formation of the Eastern Hills and Bogotá savanna on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes. The predominantly shale and siltstone form ...

s. Pulsations of the fault movement in the early

Quaternary The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.58 million years ...

have produced the

alluvial fan An alluvial fan is an accumulation of sediments that fans outwards from a concentrated source of sediments, such as a narrow canyon emerging from an escarpment. They are characteristic of mountainous terrain in arid to semiarid climates, but a ...

s of the

Tunjuelo Formation The Tunjuelo Formation, Río Tunjuelo or Río Tunjuelito Formation ( es, Formación Tunjuelo, Q1tu, Qpt, Qcc) is a formation (geology), geological formation of the Bogotá savanna, Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Cordillera Oriental (Colombia), Eastern R ...

. In part, the fault is covered by Late

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

deposits of the

Sabana Formation The Sabana Formation ( es, Formación Sabana, Q1sa, QTs) is a geological formation of the Bogotá savanna, Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes. The formation consists mainly of shales with at the edges of the Bogotá ...

showing a pre-Holocene activity with no known historical seismicity or registered damages. The present slip rate of the Bogotá Fault is established at per year.

Etymology

The fault is named after

Bogotá Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city of Colombia, and one of the larges ...

, Cundinamarca by Thomas Clements, who performed the first study on the fault in 1940.

Description

The Bogotá Fault extends across the

along the base of the mountain front that borders the flatlands known as the

, to the east bordering the Bogotá Anticlinal for .Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 2005, p.4 The fault follows the longitudinal axis of the Eastern Hills,

striking Strike may refer to: People *Strike (surname) Physical confrontation or removal *Strike (attack), attack with an inanimate object or a part of the human body intended to cause harm *Airstrike, military strike by air forces on either a suspected ...

north-northeast to south-southwest at 013.5 ± 7 and dipping 15-25 degrees to the east.Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 2005, p.1 It forms the tectonic limit with the Bogotá savanna and acts as a barrier for

aquifer An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing, permeable rock, rock fractures, or unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, or silt). Groundwater from aquifers can be extracted using a water well. Aquifers vary greatly in their characterist ...

s.Velandia & De Bermoudes, 2002, p.42 The fault runs parallel to the Usme Fault.Paris et al., 2000b The tectonic regime of the

and

is the result of the interaction of four

tectonic plates Plate tectonics (from the la, label=Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large te ...

; the

Malpelo Plate The Malpelo Plate is a small tectonic plate (microplate) located off the coasts west of Ecuador and Colombia. It is the 57th plate to be identified. It is named after Malpelo Island, the only emerged part of the plate. It is bounded on the west ...

in the west, the

Caribbean Plate The Caribbean Plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the north coast of South America. Roughly 3.2 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) in area, the Caribbean Plate borders ...

in the north, the

South American Plate The South American Plate is a major tectonic plate which includes the continent of South America as well as a sizable region of the Atlantic Ocean seabed extending eastward to the African Plate, with which it forms the southern part of the Mid-A ...

in the east and the North Andes Plate where the Altiplano Cundiboyacense is located. The compressional tectonics of the

Andean orogeny The Andean orogeny ( es, Orogenia andina) is an ongoing process of orogeny that began in the Early Jurassic and is responsible for the rise of the Andes mountains. The orogeny is driven by a reactivation of a long-lived subduction system along ...

thrusted the Cretaceous units of the

and

on top of the younger

and

s.Geological Map Bogotá, 1997 The timing of the recent Andean uplift was Pleistocene, concluded on the basis of

apatite Apatite is a group of phosphate minerals, usually hydroxyapatite, fluorapatite and chlorapatite, with high concentrations of OH−, F− and Cl− ions, respectively, in the crystal. The formula of the admixture of the three most common e ...

fission track Ion tracks are damage-trails created by swift heavy ions penetrating through solids, which may be sufficiently-contiguous for chemical etching in a variety of crystalline, glassy, and/or polymeric solids. They are associated with cylindrical da ...

analysis by structural geologist Andrés Mora.Torres et al., 2005, p.131 The

units of the

are folded producing the Bogotá Anticlinal,Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 2005, pp.13–14 and showing a vertical stratigraphic displacement of at least .Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 1992, p.8 The

, named after the Bogotá savanna were deposited in the Pleistocene

paleolake A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much larger ...

Lake Humboldt Lake Humboldt or Humboldt Lake is an endorheic basin lake in northern Churchill County and southern Pershing County in the state of Nevada in the United States. The lake has the name of Alexander von Humboldt, a German natural scientist. The la ...

, of which the many

wetlands A wetland is a distinct ecosystem that is flooded or saturated by water, either permanently (for years or decades) or seasonally (for weeks or months). Flooding results in oxygen-free (anoxic) processes prevailing, especially in the soils. The ...

and the

Bogotá River The Bogotá River is a major river of the Cundinamarca department of Colombia. A right tributary of the Magdalena River, the Bogotá River crosses the region from the northeast to the southwest and passing along the western limits of Bogotá. The ...

are the present-day remainders.Montoya & Reyes, 2005, p.72 The fault mainly cuts

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of th ...

and

Tertiary Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start ...

sedimentary rocks and, to some extent, early

deposits. The fault produces strong slope changes between different geologic units on both sides of the fault plane and displays degraded fault scarps,Paris et al., 2000a, p.47 especially the well-known

, the location where the fault was first studied.Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 2005, p.2 The

breccia Breccia () is a rock composed of large angular broken fragments of minerals or rocks cemented together by a fine-grained matrix. The word has its origins in the Italian language, in which it means "rubble". A breccia may have a variety of di ...

ted zone of the fault has a width between . The brecciated area of the fault is well exposed along the road from Bogotá to La Calera, north of Calle 85 in the capital. At the entrance to the cable car going up to Monserrate, the fault shows reverse and normal offset faults and produced fractures in the

shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolin, Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4) and tiny fragments (silt-sized particles) of other minerals, especial ...

s (Plaeners Formation) of the Guadalupe Group. The

s of the

were produced by the seismic pulses of the Bogotá Fault.Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 1996, p.13

Activity

The Bogotá Fault was first analyzed by Thomas Clements in 1940,Clements, 1940 and he concluded the fault was still active.Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 2005, p.5 However, later studies have shown the fault does not displace younger Quaternary deposits and is hence determined being inactive. No known

historical earthquakes Historical earthquakes is a list of significant earthquakes known to have occurred prior to the beginning of the 20th century. As the events listed here occurred before routine instrumental recordings, they rely mainly on the analysis of writte ...

have been produced by the fault,Espinosa Baquero, 2004 and recent seismic activity has not been registered.Acosta & Garay, 2002, p.93 The Bogotá Fault crosscuts the Rosales tunnel where no damages have been noted.Lobo-Guerrero Uscátegui, 2005, p.6 A slip rate of per year is calculated from displaced geomorphologic Quaternary features.Paris et al., 2000a, p.48

Gallery

File:Monserrate.JPG, Monserrate Hill was formed by the Bogotá Fault File:Cerro Aguanoso Bogota.JPG, Fault scarps at Cerro Aguanoso File:Chapinero, Bogotá, Bogota, Colombia - panoramio - aalozadag (8).jpg, Intense fracturing in the Guadalupe Group

References

Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * *

Maps

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bogota Fault Seismic faults of Colombia Thrust faults Inactive faults Faults Faults Geography of Bogotá