The contribution of landslides to the Quaternary evolution of relief is poorly documented in arid contexts. In southern Peru and northern Chile, several massive landslides disrupt the arid western Andean front. The Chuquibamba landslide, located in southern Peru, belongs to this set of large landslides. In this area, the Incapuquio fault system captures the intermittent drainage network and localizes rotational landslides. Seismic activity is significant in this region with recurrent Mw 9 subduction earthquakes; however, none of the latest seismic events have triggered a major landslide. New terrestrial cosmogenic dating of the Chuquibamba landslide provides evidence that the last major gravitational mobilization of these rotational landslide deposits occurred at ~ 102 ka, during the Ouki wet climatic event identified on the Altiplano between 120 and 98 ka. Our results suggest that wet e...

Trabajo presentado en el 8th International Symposium on Andean Geodynamics (ISAG), realizado en Quito-Ecuador, del 24-26 setiembre, 2019. Evento organizado por el Instituto Geofísico, Escuela Politécnica Nacional (IG-EPN) del Ecuador, y el French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD).

The central part of the Western Andes holds an exceptional concentration of giant paleolandslides involving very large volumes of rock material (v > km3). While those gravitational slope failures are interpreted consensually as an erosional response to the geodynamic activity of the Andes (relief formation and tectonic activity), the question of their triggering mechanisms remains enigmatic. To clarify the respectiveroles of climatic versus seismic forcing on the Andean landslides, new temporal constraints on paleomovements are essential. Here, we focus on one of those giant slope failures, the Aricota giant rockslide that damned the Locumba valley in southern Peru. We conducted fieldwork, high-resolution DEM analysis and cosmogenic nuclide dating to decipher its development history and failure mechanisms. Our results point to the occurrence of two successive events. A giant failure mobi...

Thermochronological data are essential to constrain thermal and exhumation histories in active mountain ranges. In the Central Andes, bedrock outcrops are rare, being blanketed by widespread late Palaeogene–Neogene and younger volcanic formations. For this reason, the exhumation history of the Western Cordillera (WC) in the Peruvian Andes has only been investigated locally along the mountain range. Dense thermochronological data are only available in canyons of the Arequipa (16° S) and Cordillera Negra regions (10° S). We present new apatite (U-Th)/He and fission-track data from the 1 km deep Cañete Canyon (13° S), where the Oligo-Miocene deposits are preserved lying conformably on an Eocene palaeo-topographic surface. Thermal modelling of thermochronological data indicate that the 30–20 Ma ignimbrite deposits overlying the bedrock were thick enough to cause burial rehe...