Salta, Quebrada, Argentina 🇦🇷
Quebrada de Humahuaca is a narrow mountain valley in northern Argentina. It's known for its dramatic rock formations and hills, and its indigenous Quechuan villages. In the south, the rocky, multihued slopes of the Seven Colors Hill rise above the Spanish colonial village of Purmamarca.
The red beds of La Yesera Formation, which are the basal strata of the Salta Rift, accumulated from the Late Neocomian to the Cenomanian. The La Yesera Formation is thicker than 700 meters in the Alemanía sub-basin. The unit is made up of three sections: the lower and upper ones are dominated by conglomerates, and the middle section consists of sandstone and siltstone. It is proposed here to consider these sections as formal members. The lower section, or Yacutuy Member, is composed of alluvial-fan conglomerates and scarce mud-flat sandstone and siltstone. The middle section, previously identified as Las Chacras Member, consists of mud flat siltstone and sandstone. The upper section, or Don Bartolo Member, is composed of alluvial-fan conglomerates and lava flows of the Isonza Basalt.
A cuesta is a hill or ridge with a gentle slope on one side, and a steep slope on the other. In geology the term is more specifically applied to a ridge where a harder sedimentary rock overlies a softer layer, the whole being tilted somewhat from the horizontal. This results in a long and gentle backslope called a dip slope that conforms with the dip of resistant strata, called caprock. Where erosion has exposed the frontslope of this, a steep slope or escarpment occurs. The resulting terrain may be called scarpland.
Cuestas are the expression of extensive outcrops of gently dipping strata, typically sedimentary strata, that consist of alternating beds of weak or loosely cemented strata, i.e. shale, mudstone, and marl and hard, well-lithified strata, i.e. sandstone and limestone. The surfaces of the hard, erosion-resistant rock strata form the caprock of the backslope (dip-slope) of the cuesta, where erosion has preferentially removed the weaker strata. The frontslope of the cuesta consists of an escarpment that cuts across the bedding of the strata comprising it. Because of the gently dipping nature of the strata that forms a cuesta, a significant shift in horizontal location will take place as the landscape is lowered by erosion.