Cachet Fault is a

dextral Sinistral and dextral, in some scientific fields, are the two types of chirality ("handedness") or relative direction. The terms are derived from the Latin words for "left" (''sinister'') and "right" (''dexter''). Other disciplines use different ...

strike-slip fault 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 ...

Aysén Region The Aysén del General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo Region ( es, Región de Aysén, , '), often shortened to Aysén Region or Aisén,Examples of name usage1, official regional government site refers to the region as "Región de Aysén"., Chile's of ...

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

. The fault runs in north–south direction right to the east of the

Northern Patagonian Ice Field The Northern Patagonian Ice Field, located in southern Chile, is the smaller of two remnant parts in which the Patagonian Ice Sheet in the Andes Mountains of southern South America can be divided. It is completely contained within the boundaries ...

. Various west-east glacial valleys have been displaced the movement of the fault. The existence of the fault and its movement has been linked to the

Chile Triple Junction The Chile Triple Junction (or Chile Margin Triple Junction) is a geologic triple junction located on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean off Taitao and Tres Montes Peninsula on the southern coast of Chile. Here three tectonic plates meet: the South ...

and the

oblique subduction Oblique subduction is a form of subduction (i.e. a tectonic process involving the convergence of two plates where the denser plate descends into Earth's interior) for which the convergence direction differs from 90° to the plate boundary. Most c ...

Nazca Plate The Nazca Plate or Nasca Plate, named after the Nazca region of southern Peru, is an oceanic tectonic plate in the eastern Pacific Ocean basin off the west coast of South America. The ongoing subduction, along the Peru–Chile Trench, of the Na ...

. The fault exhibits present-day seismicity. Together, Exploradores Fault Zone and Liquiñe-Ofqui Fault Zone and Cachet Fault makes up the boundaries of a

crustal block Fault blocks are very large blocks of rock, sometimes hundreds of kilometres in extent, created by tectonic and localized stresses in Earth's crust. Large areas of bedrock are broken up into blocks by faults. Blocks are characterized by relat ...

that has been uplifted hosting at present the Northern Patagonian Ice Field.

References

Geology of Aysén Region Seismic faults of Chile Strike-slip faults {{struct-geology-stub