Collaborative Research: Austral Portals Workshop: Tectonics, Paleogeography and Biogeography

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This award supports a workshop at the American Museum of Natural History in May 2010 with the explicit goal of charting a path towards rectifying apparent incongruities in the paleobiogeographic and plate tectonic histories of peri-Antarctic Gondwana. The "Austral Portals" workshop is designed to bring together investigators from a broad swath of geological and biological disciplines whose interests converge on sorting out the manifold consequences of the breakup of Gondwana, with the primary goal of focusing on the newest research on the paleogeography and paleobiogeography of Antarctica and the western parts of the supercontinent (South America and Africa/India/Madagascar). One prominent reason for bringing together this group at this time is that there are several specific instances of disagreement concerning how the paleogeography of Antarctica may or may not have influenced the distribution of terrestrial biotas in the interval 140-40 Ma. Much of the relevant work has been published only in the last few years, yet largely remains unfamiliar to investigators who may be working in very different areas of scientific inquiry. Another major issue concerns the timing of the opening of para-Antarctic oceanic gateways, such as the Drake Passage, and how these seaways may have affected climate and, indirectly, the evolution of austral biotas.