Mejillones Peninsula

This article is about the landform peninsula. For other uses, see Mejillones (disambiguation).

Mejillones Peninsula (Spanish: península de Mejillones) protrudes from the coast of northern Chile north of Antofagasta and south of the port of Mejillones.

Satellite picture showing Mejillones Peninsula and part of Atacama Desert.

The basement rocks of the peninsula are made of metamorphic and igneous rocks that formed in the Late Triassic plus plutons formed in the Early Jurassic.^[1] The eastern part of the peninsula hosts various normal faults.^[2] Extensional tectonics in the peninsula begun no later than in the Early Miocene and has resulted in the formation of two half graben basins. The uplift that the peninsula had in the Pliocene and Pleistocene has been attributed to subcrustal accretion in the subduction system.^[3]

See also

• Arauco Peninsula
• Atacama Fault
• Coastal Cliff of northern Chile
• Guano

References

1. Casquet, C.; Hervé, F.; Pankhurst, R.J.; Baldo, E.; Calderón, M.; Fanning, C.M.; Rapela, C.W.; Dahlquist, J. (2014). "The Mejillonia suspect terrane (Northern Chile): Late Triassic fast burial and metamorphism of sediments in a magmatic arc environment extending into the Early Jurassic". Gondwana Research. 25: 1272–1286.
2. Niemeyer, Hans; González, Gabriel; Martínez-De Los Ríos, Edmundo (1996). "Evolución tectónica cenozoica del margen continental activo de Antofagasta, norte de Chile". Revista Geológica de Chile (in Spanish). 23 (2): 165–186.
3. Cantalamessa, Gino; Di Celma, Claudio; Ragaini, Luca; Valleri, Gigliola; Landini, Walter (2005). "Neogene stratigraphic architecture and tectonic evolution of the Mejillones Peninsula (northern Chile) based on a new 1:50,000 geological map" (PDF). Extended abstracts. 6th International Symposium on Andean Geodynamics. Barcelona. pp. 142–145.

23.29°S 70.51°W / -23.29; -70.51