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| Presidente - Motrópolis Moto Clube. (2017). Valle de la Luna. Retrieved from: HERE |
This week we traveled to Valle de la Luna in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. This area is part of Atacama desert in the Chile Andes and is considered one of the driest places on Earth (Wikipedia, 2018). The mountain ranges here are created by oceanic crust converging into a continental crust. This causes compressive stress on the South American plate because the Nazca plate is pushing in and and sinking beneath it. You can't really tell in the 2nd picture, but I drew red lines where it seems to indicate Brittle strain where the crust cracked. The highlighted blue line indicates a photo flaw that didn't line up correctly. I believe this area contains mostly brittle deformation because it's being pushed up from deep beneath the Earth. The exposed crust here has a very high altitude so the temperature is cold, lending itself to brittle, fault deformations. Since this is a converging plate, the faults would be either reverse or thrust faults. I'm not entirely sure about the rock type being formed here.
Reference:
Wikipedia. (2018). Valle de la Luna (Chile). Retrieved from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valle_de_la_Luna_(Chile)
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