CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In order to further understand the controls on the structural configuration of inverted basins, previousresearch has vastly explored the role of rift-stage stress field variations on the resulting structure produced by basin inversion. Analogue modeling has broadly enabled geoscientists to gain insight into thecontrols on the structural evolution during basin inversion, such as: the inherited structural array of thebasin, sedimentary load or sedimentary thickness, plan-view shape of the basin (length and width), andvariations on the governing stress field, among other factors. This work sheds light on the influenceexerted by the closure style on inversion of an elongated model basin with a variable width, generated bydifferential extension. We subsequently induced inversion by modifying the orientation of the post-riftcontractional stress field: (i) in a first model, contraction is homogeneous along-strike (parallel to themajor axis of the basin); and (ii) in a second model, contraction is heterogeneous along-strike andexerted in the same orientation and amount in which extension was induced (about a pivot point). Wefocus on the three-dimensional geometry of the structures generated by inversion, their vergence andsurficial trace, and where they are prone to concentrate within the basin, to finally analyze and compareour results with natural examples of inverted Andean basin systems. Our results indicate that most of thecontractional deformation imposed in the analog models is absorbed in the interiors of the basin in itswidest zones by means of inverted normal faults and backthrusts. However, when the amount ofshortening is higher than extension, deformation is propagated outside the basin where shortcuts andnew oblique reverse faults are dominant, which promote a major uplift