Plio-Quatemary faulted marine terraces are distinctively recognizable at four levels along the 110 km-long coast around the Altos de Talinay, north-central Chile. The authors named them the Talinay I, II, III and IV terraces in descending order. The Talinay I terrace reaches 675 m in altitude with a 6-8 km wide terrace surface which probably emerged in the Pliocene-early Pleistocene time. The Talinay III terrace (30-50 m) and Talinay IV terrace (20-30 m) are tentatively assigned to the oxygen isotope stage 9 and 5e, respectively. Height distribution of the paleoshorelines shows that the uplift pattern varied from a rapid updoming in the early Pleistocene to a regional uplift after the middle Pleistocene, Most faults trend nearly north-south and are dip-slip normal faults, which show progressive deformation of the Talinay terraces I and II, No fault activity is seen on younger Talinay III and IV terraces. Such fault movements, chronologically synchronized with the early Pleistocene updoming of the Altos de Talinay, suggest that the extensional stress field was predominant in the upper crust. The change in tectonic pattern, probably, resulted from the weakening of coupling between the Nazca Plate and South America Plate in the middle Pleistocene.