Geologic Studies in the Shackleton Range Coats Land, and Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica: A North American Connection

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It has been suggested that the Pacific margins of the East Antarctic and North American Precambrian cratons were formerly juxtaposed, and that they drifted apart to initiate the Pacific Ocean during the fragmentation of a Neoproterozoic supercontinent. The most critical and immediate testable evidence put forward in support of this hypothesis is the apparent continuation of the northwestern boundary of the Grenville orogen of the North American craton, the Grenville front, into East Antarctica at the head of the Weddell Sea between the Shackleton Range and Coasts Land, an area seldom visited and never studied in detail by American geologists. This award supports an initial test of the hypothesis, a geologic, geochemical, geochronometric, and paleomagnetic study of the Antarctic rocks in question, in order to compare them with those adjacent to the Grenville front in the southwestern United States. The work will include detailed stratigraphic study of the only undisturbed Neoproterozoic sedimentary sequence in the Antarctic continent.