Lithosphere Removal in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (SNSM) in northwestern Colombia is one of the world's highest coastal mountains, with an elevation above 5 km. Gravity measurements show that the SNSM has a positive Bouguer anomaly (>+130 mGal), indicating that the mountain lacks a crustal root. In this work, we test the hypothesis that these observations can be explained by gravitational removal of the dense lower lithosphere. We use 2D numerical models to examine the dynamics of lithosphere removal and its effect on surface elevation and gravity anomaly. The models consist of continental lithosphere that includes a pre‐thickened crustal region, representing the SNSM. In our preferred model, the dense mantle lithosphere and crustal root are gravitationally unstable and undergo removal as local drips within ∼10 Ma from the onset of foundering. This creates an area of thinned crust (∼38 km) underlain by a buoyant sublithospheric mantle where melting and low seismic velocities are predicted. Subsequent non‐isostatic forces maintain a topography of 3.3 km with a 2D Bouguer gravity anomaly of +103 mGal. Parameter tests show that a strong lower‐crustal rheology provides greater support for the high topography and that a weak mantle lithosphere rheology produces faster removal. The models demonstrate that local lithosphere dynamics can explain the first‐order observations in the SNSM. We propose that lithosphere removal could have occurred recently (∼2 Ma), explaining the localized low seismic velocity zone below the SNSM, or at 56–40 Ma, inducing anomalous short‐lived Eocene magmatism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".