When the African-South American separation modified continental erosion

Scientific result

18 December 2023

Land masses outside mountain ranges account for more than 60% of the world’s landmass. Despite their low relief and erosion, they make a significant contribution to the flow of sediments exported to the ocean. However, unlike mountain ranges, their export capacity has rarely been studied and has never been fully quantified. This constitutes a major bias in global erosion budgets, which are fundamental to understanding the links between climate, landforms and biogeochemical cycles on a global scale.

a) Map of the African and South American rift systems (in green) around 120 Ma during the break-up of the Gondwana continent. b) Palaeogeographic map of the study area (fixed Africa) during the Aptian (120-115 Ma) showing the main deformation structures and sedimentation domains (orange: continental; yellow: deltaic; light blue: shallow marine; dark blue: deep marine). The current shoreline is shown in blue.

Read more on the INSU website.

GET contact: Delphine Rouby

Sources :

Rouby et al., Source-To-Sink Sedimentary Budget of the African Equatorial Atlantic Rifted Margin, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 2023

More news

Ancient guano reveals how climate change could shape the future of seabird populations

The history of seabird population sizes prior to the Anthropocene (the modern era) remains largely unknown. This gap limits our understanding of current phenomena and our ability to predict the […]

Central African Forest: 600,000 Years of Human History Uncovered Beneath the Canopy

Archaeological excavations conducted in the Congo Basin show that these territories have been inhabited, traversed, and transformed for hundreds of thousands of years—long before Homo sapiens’ great exodus from Africa. […]

10,000 Years of Food Inequality

An international team of researchers (Inrap, CNRS, Simon Fraser University) has published an article in the journal PNAS titled “Dietary Inequality Marker Reveals 10,000 Years of Gender and Cultural Disparity […]

Search