Issues

Cover: The Aracataca river drains the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a crystalline massif forming the northernmost Andean promontory, just juxtaposed against the continental slope of the Caribbean Sea. Before reaching the alluvial plains of the Lower Magdalena Valley the river becomes incised into conglomeratic beds of a delta complex that records the Oligocene exhumation of this crystalline massif. Upon leaving this gorge, the river crosses the Macondo hamlet, the name of which inspired the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, to name the hometown of his magic universe. See “Early Neogene unroofing of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, as determined from detrital geothermochronology and the petrology of clastic basin sediments” by Piraquive et al., p. 355–380.

Photo by: Andreas Kammer

Cover design by: Eric Christensen