Qualla: Sabana Formation

Sabana Formation: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Bogotá is built on the bottom of a lake that isn't there anymore. For most of the Ice Age, the high valley now occupied by Colombia's capital was filled with Lake Humboldt - a cold body of water fed by glaciers from the Sumapaz páramo to the south. Around 30,000 years ago the lake began to retreat. When it was gone it left behind 320 meters of grey shale, lignite, and volcanic ash, embedded with the bones of Pleistocene mastodons and the butchered remains of their last meals. The Sabana Formation is that lakebed. The city sits on it. The roads crack because of it.

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Image: Public domain

Sabana Formation: A Lake in the Andes

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit momentcaptured1 from NYC, USA, CC BY 2.0. The Altiplano Cundiboyacense - the high plateau in the Eastern Range of the Colombian Andes - was formed during the final stage of Andean uplift in the Plio-Pleistocene. Before that last uplift, this region was a rift basin that had flooded periodically since Mesozoic time. When ...

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Image: momentcaptured1 from NYC, USA | CC BY 2.0

Sabana Formation: The Lake's Last Residents

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Grundkarte Milenioscuro, Relief Alexrk2, CC BY-SA 3.0. During the final phase of Lake Humboldt, around the Last Glacial Maximum, the shoreline hosted populations of Pleistocene megafauna. Fossils of the giant ground sloth Megatherium have been found at Quipile; Eremotherium at Fusagasugá and Tocaima; Notiomastodon platensis, a South ...

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Image: Grundkarte Milenioscuro, Relief Alexrk2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sabana Formation: First People

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ব্যা করণ, CC0. About 12,500 years ago, the first confirmed humans in Colombia came to this landscape. At El Abra, Tibitó, and Tequendama - rock shelters at the edge of the retreating lake - small groups of hunter-gatherers sheltered, worked stone into tools, and used the bones of the still-exta...

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Image: ব্যা করণ | CC0

Sabana Formation: The Muisca Center

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the first and second millennia CE, an advanced civilization had grown on the savanna: the Muisca Confederation, a loose alliance of caciques governing much of the Altiplano. The southern Muisca territory centered on the Bogotá savanna, with its main settlement at Bacatá in the...

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Image: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sabana Formation: The City That Cracks

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fama Clamosa, CC BY-SA 4.0. The foundation is not kind to modern construction. The northern neighborhoods of Bogotá - especially those north of Avenida Chile (Calle 72) in Chapinero and west of the Autopista Norte - sit on unconsolidated Sabana Formation shales that compact differentially under load. Sandy ...

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Image: Fama Clamosa | CC BY-SA 4.0