Maipo is a stratovolcano in the Andes, lying on the border between Argentina and Chile. It is located 90 km (56 mi) south of Tupungato and about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Santiago.
Maipo retains a symmetrical, conical volcanic shape, unlike many of the other nearby peaks, making it the best known peak in the region, though it is not the highest. (Nearby Castillo is 5,485 m high.) Maipo is also almost the southernmost 5,000 metre peak in the Andes. (That honor goes to Sosneado, about 50 km to the south).
Maipo is located within the Diamante Caldera, a feature of about 15 km by 20 km size that is about one-half million years old. It rises about 1,900 m (6,230 ft) above the floor of the caldera. Immediately to the east of the peak, on the eastern side of the caldera floor, is Laguna del Diamante, a picturesque lake that formed when lava flows blocked drainage channels from the caldera in 1826. The Diamante Caldera erupted 450 cubic kilometers (108 cu mi) of tephra, 450 ka.
The region's climate is transitional between the drier Mediterranean climate of the peaks to the north and the cold, moist climate of Chilean Patagonia. Hence, while less glaciated than Patagonia, it has more permanent snow (on the wet, Chilean side) than peaks of similar elevation to the north.
A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in a planet's surface or crust, which allows hot magma, volcanic ash and gases to escape from below the surface.
Volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. A mid-oceanic ridge, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has examples of volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates pulling apart; the Pacific Ring of Fire has examples of volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates coming together. By contrast, volcanoes are usually not created where two tectonic plates slide past one another. Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the Earth's crust in the interiors of plates, e.g., in the East African Rift, the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and the Rio Grande Rift in North America. This type of volcanism falls under the umbrella of "Plate hypothesis" volcanism. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has also been explained as mantle plumes. These so-called "hotspots", for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs with magma from the core-mantle boundary, 3,000 km deep in the Earth.
South America (Spanish: América del Sur, Sudamérica, or Suramérica; Portuguese: América do Sul; Quechua and Aymara: Urin Awya Yala; Guarani: Ñembyamérika; Dutch: Zuid-Amerika; French: Amérique du Sud) is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest. It includes twelve independent countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela—and French Guiana, which is an overseas region of France. The South American countries that border the Caribbean Sea—Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana—are also known as Caribbean South America.
Southern Cone (Spanish: Cono Sur, Portuguese: Cone Sul) is a geographic region composed of the southernmost areas of South America, south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Although geographically this includes part of Southern and Southeast (São Paulo) of Brazil, in terms of political geography the Southern cone has traditionally comprised Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In the narrowest sense, it only covers Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, bounded on the north by the states of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and south to the junction between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which it is the closest continental area of Antarctica (1000 km).
The main language spoken in the region is Spanish owing to the Spanish colonization from the 16th to the 19th century; if one includes Brazil, Portuguese would be first.
High life expectancy, the highest Human Development Index of Latin America, high standard of living, significant participation in the global markets and the emerging economy of its members make the Southern Cone the most prosperous macro-region in South America.
Argentina i/ˌɑrdʒənˈtiːnə/, officially the Argentine Republic (Spanish: República Argentina, pronounced: [re̞ˈpuβlika arxe̞nˈtina]), is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires. It is the eighth-largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations.
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