We know there are (at least) two suture zones between the coast and the Eastern Cordillera (both are south to north time transgressive, one was completed by the late Cretaceous, one began in the early Cenozoic and is still finishing up north of 7N).
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There is no agreement on the vergence of those two sutures among people working in Colombia. This makes it difficult to trust the interpretations of structures projected into the middle & lower crust, something to keep in mind when looking at cross-sections like those in the linked paper.
Those sutures I know, and they’re highly oblique and act as strike-slip faults since the late Cretaceous. Their motion is an order of magnitude larger than the shortening in the Cordillera. In that light, the chronology of the shortening may not be an important signal of regional tectonic motion.
More a point on the inability of anyone working in Colombia to agree on which direction the largest structures in the region actually dip than on the shortening taken up by them.
If *that* can't be agreed on, not sure how reliable interpretations of smaller-scale, mid-crustal features are.
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If *that* can't be agreed on, not sure how reliable interpretations of smaller-scale, mid-crustal features are.