Geological Memories of South Brazilian Landscapes: From Precambrian Orogenesis to the Quaternary Coastal Plain

The landscapes of South Brazil include a great geodiversity of minerals, rocks, geomorphologies, rivers, falls, mountain ranges, escarpments, and coastal plains. Three geological provinces and their respective geomorphological domains dominate landscape patterns. The thick volcanic-sedimentary package of the Paraná Province constitutes the vast Meridional Plateau and its Peripheral Depression. The Mantiqueira Province, a narrow ribbon parallel to the coast, forms the southern portion of the Atlantic Plateau, and sandy to muddy deposits pave the Coastal Plain Province. This chapter discusses geodiversity and geological memories that constitute the “landscape DNA” of the southeastern region of the South American plate. These geological registers give evidence of the evolution of the continents, from Rodinia, during Mesoproterozoic Era, to the coalescence of Gondwana and Pangea, in the Paleozoic Era. The crucial questions explored in this chapter are how the collision of microcontinents amalgamated, forming the Gondwana supercontinent, and how it fragmented in current South America. The main geotectonic events that structured the rocks assemblies of the Precambrian Mantiqueira Province, the basement of the Paraná Basin, will be considered in detail regarding diachronic orogens systems. Also, this chapter will investigate the sedimentary-volcanic thick package of the Paraná Basin that keeps records of 400 million years of the Gondwana supercontinent. The massive Cretaceous volcanism that marks the beginning of Gondwana fragmentation is detailed, and the main geomorphological configuration of the Atlantic Plateau elucidated. Our history ends with sea-level changes that formed the Atlantic Coastal Plain during the Quaternary Period while South America drifts on its long geological journey toward the West.