Contribution to the reconstruction of geological evolution of the metamorphic basement of the Cordillera Darwin, Tierra del Fuego, Chile.

The crystalline pre-Andine basement outcrops only in the Cordillera Darwin (Tierra del Fuego) in the extreme southern part of Andean belt. It is located between the Antarctic, Nazca and Scotia Plate. Cordillera Darwin breaks the long ophiolitic belt constituted by the Sarmiento Complex and Rocas Verdes; many authors agree that the present setting is the result of the Andean orogenesis, that yielded to the closure of a Jurassic marginal basin (now represented by ophiolites) with its overlying sequence of rhyolitic volcanic and volcanoclastic rocks, now represented by the Tobifera Formation and metamorphism during Cretaceous (Cunningham, 1995 and references). The studied rocks, sampled by A.D…