Project Details
Projekt
Subsidence evolution at the conjugate Argentine and South African passive margins of the South Atlantic. SUBSIDE
Subject Area
Geophysics
Palaeontology
Palaeontology
Term
from 2008 to 2016
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 79623743
The goal of this project is to understand the structure and the mechanisms of subsidence of two conjugate volcanic passive margin segments of the South Atlantic on a regional and lithospheric scale. We use reconstruction methods to evaluate why breakup of the South American and African continental plates during the Cretaceous resulted in asymmetric basins on both margins with strongly differing individual subsidence histories. Building on the results of the project funded in phase one, we use lithosphere-scale data-based 3D structural models of the two conjugate volcanic passive margin segments offshore South Africa and Argentine in the South Atlantic as a starting point to reconstruct the post-breakup history. These models of the present state include the sediments, the crystalline crust and the mantle lithosphere and are consistent with well, seismic and seismological data available from industry and academic experiments as well as with the observed gravity and thermal fields. Based on this present-day configuration, we investigate which structural evolution and thermal history accompanied the post-breakup subsidence on the conjugate margins and evaluate the spatial and temporal variations of the thermal field considering results from other projects in the SPP. The project contributes to the topic lithosphere structure, deformation and breakup processes in the SPP SAMPLE as it evaluates implications for the lithosphere-scale thermal evolution of the margins, for their paleo-geographic configuration, and for the geodynamic mechanisms explaining variations in subsidence history.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Participating Persons
Professor Hans-Peter Bunge, Ph.D.; Dr. Dieter Franke; Professor Dr. Hans-Jürgen Götze
