Fifty years of plate tectonics in the Central Andes

Abstract

A review of the last 50 years of the application of plate tectonics to understand the formation of the Andes, from the pioneering model of John Dewey in 1969, shows a series of milestones that lead to the current knowledge of the processes. Among these are the proposals by William Dickinson that showed the variation of the composition of the volcanic arcs as the volcanic front migrated towards the foreland, the control of the variations in the geometry of the subduction zone of Bryan Isacks and Mawia Barazangi, and the establishment of the crustal roots of the Andes and its evolution since the Paleozoic by David James. With the proposal of the segmentation of the Andes, the participation of researchers from the region starts, culminating in a better understanding of the evolution of the basement, the arc magmatism, and the associated structural deformation. In recent years, technological advances, especially in geophysical research, with the application of different methods to obtain seismic tomographies and seismotectonic analyses, have shown a bloom of new hypotheses that are currently in process of validation.