Aconcagua 2014 Kilian Jornet set a record for climbing and descending Aconcagua from Horcones in 12 hours and 49 minutes. The record was broken less than two months later by Ecuadorian-Swiss Karl Egloff, in a time of 11 hours 52 minutes, nearly an hour faster than Kilian Jornet. The mountain has a cameo in a 1942 Disney cartoon called "Pedro", which features a small, anthropomorphic airplane named Pedro who has a near-disastrous encounter with Aconcagua while carrying mail over the Andes. Aconcagua is the highest peak in the Americas and is also considered an "easy" high altitude peak, being nearly .
Ojos del Salado of the Nazca Plate beneath the South America Plate became increasingly shallower and this caused volcanism to shift from the Maricunga Belt to the Ojos del Salado region. The Paleozoic basement crops out only northwest of Nevado Tres Cruces. Other geologic units in the region are Oligocene sedimentary units and volcanic rocks ranging from Oligocene age to less than 1.5 million years old. The area is part of a tectonic boundary between a volcanically active region north of the boundary and a less volcanically active region south of the boundary, which is also characterized by geographical differences, e.g. the presence