Plate Rotation of the Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since the Late Cretaceous: Implications for the Tectonic Evolution of the Scotia Sea Region

Abstract

West Antarctica has been ascribed as the "problem child of Gondwanaland" due to its ambiguous paleoposition in Gondwana, which has hampered our knowledge of global plate interactions, ocean circulation, paleoclimate, and paleobiogeography (Dalziel & Elliot, 1982;Dalziel et al., 2021). The Antarctic Peninsula is located at the northernmost part of West Antarctica, on the southern border of the Scotia Sea (Figure 1). A decrease in global temperatures following the early Eocene climatic optimum (∼53-49 Ma) has been traditionally linked to the opening of the Scotia Sea Gateway and the Tasmanian Gateway, which allowed the formation of the clockwise-flowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) and the thermal isolation of the Antarctic continent (Bijl et al., 2013;Kennett et al., 1975). However, climate simulations show that the opening of these gateways can only account for a few degrees of global deep-water cooling without significant temperature change in tropical areas (Goldner et al., 2014). Given the synchronous evolution of tropical and polar temperatures and the parallel evolution of

Ridge Subduction: Unraveling the Consequences Linked to a Slab Window Development Beneath South America at the Chile Triple Junction

“…The shear wave seismic tomography from Mark et al ( 2022) is available at Mark et al (2021). Plate rotations and kinematics based on Gao et al (2023) model. Colormaps of Crameri et al (2020) are available at Crameri (2023).…”

“…Plate kinematics based on Gao et al. (2023) rotation model using a hotspot reference frame in the GPlates software (http://www.gplates.org/). Colormaps according to Crameri et al.…”