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Gondwana

About: Gondwana is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6078 publications have been published within this topic receiving 263050 citations. The topic is also known as: Gondwanaland.


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01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of global sea level cycles on tectonic evolution is investigated. But the authors focus on the geology of the Banda Sea and not on the seafloor of the Indian Ocean.
Abstract: Late mesozoic and cainozoic tectonic features - Wallace's line and its meaning, oceanic crust of the Indian Ocean and marginal seas, the Bengal and Nicobar abyssal fans, gravity measurements, active plate margins, Molucca Sea collision zone, Banda Sea, collision between the Australian continent and the Banda arc, Sunda arc-trench system, the main continental plates and microcontinents cainozoic sedimentary basins - classification, effect of global sea level cycles, tertiary basins in Borneo, basins of the Sunda Shelf and Gulf of Thailand, phillipine archipelago, eastern Indonesia phanerozoic tectonic framework - tectono-strtigraphic evolution, palinspastic reconstructions terrains of Cathaysian affinity - palaegeographic position of Cathaysia, North Vietnam complec suture fault zone, Indosinia block, the phanerozoic sedimentary cover of Indosinia, West Borneo basement block Gondwana affinity terrains - the Tibet plateau, the Himalayan tectonic terrain, post-glacial Gondwanas, Sinoburmalaya, Precambrian basement, Machinchano-Tarutau-Moloheim formations, ordovician platform, Silurian, carboniferous diamictite belt ophiolites and sutures the great Sunda-Pacific volcanic arcs - Gandise arc of the Indus-Zangbo-Yarlung system, Burma-Andaman Sea sector, Indonesia, Borneo, Philippines, Taiwan, Ryukyu arc granite and associated plutonic rocks - Tibet, Sanjiang fold system of western Yunnan, south-eastern China, Indochina region, Sundaland granite belts.

608 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Sundaland comprises a heterogeneous collage of continental blocks derived from the India-Australian margin of eastern Gondwana and assembled by the closure of multiple Tethyan and back-arc ocean basins now represented by suture zones.

581 citations

01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a series of detailed paleogeographical analyses of the Caribbean region, beginning with the opening of the Atlantic basin in the Middle Jurassic and running to the end of the Middle Miocene.
Abstract: "This paper presents a series of detailed paleogeographical analyses of the Caribbean region, beginning with the opening of the Caribbean basin in the Middle Jurassic and running to the end of the Middle Miocene. Three intervals within the Cenozoic are given special treatment: Eocene-Oligocene transition (35-33 Ma), Late Oligocene (27-25 Ma), and early Middle Miocene (16-14 Ma). While land mammals and other terrestrial vertebrates may have occupied landmasses in the Caribbean basin at any time, according to the interpretation presented here the existing Greater Antillean islands, as islands, are no older than Middle Eocene. Earlier islands must have existed, but it is not likely that they remained as such (i.e., as subaerial entities) due to repeated transgressions, subsidence, and (not incidentally) the K/T bolide impact and associated mega-tsunamis. Accordingly, we infer that the on-island lineages forming the existing (i.e., Quaternary) Antillean fauna must all be younger than Middle Eocene. The fossil record, although still very poor, is consistent with the observation that most land mammals lineages entered the Greater Antilles around the Eocene-Oligocene transition. Western Laurasia (North America) and western Gondwana (South America) were physically connected as continental areas until the mid-Jurassic, ca. 170 Ma. Terrestrial connections between these continental areas since then can only have occurred via landbridges. In the Cretaceous, three major uplift events, recorded as regional unconformities, may have produced intercontinental landbridges involving the Cretaceous Antillean island arc. The Late Campanian/Early Maastrichtian uplift event is the one most likely to have resulted in a landbridge, as it would have been coeval with uplift of the dying Cretaceous arc. However, evidence is too limited for any certainty on this point. The existing landbridge (Panamanian Isthmus) was completed in the Pliocene; evidence for a precursor bridge late in the Middle Miocene is ambiguous. We marshal extensive geological evidence to show that, during the Eocene-Oligocene transition, the developing northern Greater Antilles and northwestern South America were briefly connected by a "landspan" (i.e., a subaerial connection between a continent and one or more offshelf islands) centered on the emergent Aves Ridge. This structure (Greater Antilles + Aves Ridge) is dubbed GAARlandia. The massive uplift event that apparently permitted these connections was spent by 32 Ma; a general subsidence followed, ending the GAARlandia landspan phase. Thereafter, Caribbean neotectonism resulted in the subdivision of existing land areas. The GAARlandia hypothesis has great significance for understanding the history of the Antillean biota. Typically, the historical biogeography of the Greater Antilles is discussed in terms of whether the fauna was largely shaped by strict dispersal or strict continent-island vicariance. The GAARlandia hypothesis involves elements of both. Continent-island vicariance sensu Rosen appears to be excludable for any time period since the mid-Jurassic. Even if vicariance occurred at that time, its relevance for understanding the origin of the modern Antillean biota is minimal. Hedges and co-workers have strongly espoused over-water dispersal as the major and perhaps only method of vertebrate faunal formation in the Caribbean region. However, surface-current dispersal of propagules is inadequate as an explanation of observed distribution patterns of terrestrial faunas in the Greater Antilles. Even though there is a general tendency for Caribbean surface currents to flow northward with respect to the South American coastline, experimental evidence indicates that the final depositional sites of passively floating objects is highly unpredictable. Crucially, prior to the Pliocene, regional paleoceanography was such that current-flow patterns from major rivers would have delivered South American waifs to the Central American coast, not to the Greater or Lesser Antilles. Since at least three (capromyid rodents, pitheciine primates, and megalonychid sloths) and possibly four (nesophontid insectivores) lineages of Antillean mammals were already on one or more of the Greater Antilles by the Early Miocene, Hedges' inference as to the primacy of over-water dispersal appears to be at odds with the facts. By contrast, the landspan model is consistent with most aspects of Antillean land-mammal biogeography as currently known; whether it is consistent with the biogeography of other groups remains to be seen"--P. 3.

569 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The age relations for assembly of Gondwana and Pangea indicate that the timing of collisional orogenesis between amalgamating continental bodies was synchronous with subduction initiation and contractional orogens within accretionary orogens located along the margins of these supercontinents as mentioned in this paper.

567 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a global plate tectonic model was developed together with a large geological/geodynamic database, at the Lausanne University, covering the last 600 Ma of the Earth's history.

564 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023269
2022497
2021307
2020281
2019293
2018230