Project information
Project aim
Continents are not simple geological entities, but an amalgam of fragments of different ages that preserve evidence for the repeated joining of the landmasses to form supercontinents, and their splitting apart to form a scattered array like that seen today. Antarctica is widely believed to have behaved as a stable nucleus, or keystone, throughout much of Earth history, about which the other continents have periodically assembled, but there is increasing evidence that it could be a collage of different blocks that assembled relatively recently. This study will date geological events in the southern Prince Charles Mountains, which are a poorly understood but crucial region of exposed rock in the Antarctic interior, in order to constrain the time at which Antarctica became a coherent block.