Analysis of the Quaternary climatic and tectonic forcing along some different tectonic settings of South America

Abstract

This special issue includes some of the contributions presented at Workshops of the INQUA SAm-GeoQuat International Focus Group (IFG): "South American Project towards an integration and improvement of Quaternary geological data" (years 2013/2015), sponsored by the Commission on Terrestrial Processes, Deposits and History (TERPRO) of INQUA. This IFG was mainly composed of researchers in Quaternary Geology from South American countries. The associated 1311 INQUA Project SAQint3: "Interactions between climatic forcing, tectonics and volcanism during the Late Quaternary: a multidisciplinary approach applied on key regions of South America" was dedicated to reinforce the interactions and feedback between specialists in neotectonics and geoscientists working on surface processes that influenced actively the landscape. Field meetings, workshops and field courses sponsored by the INQUA project allowed many researchers with different geological backgrounds to meet and discuss common approaches for studying the interactions between Quaternary climatic forcing, tectonics and volcanism along a variety of tectonic settings of the continent. Some papers related to the advances in the project target areas of South America are integrated into this special issue, dedicated to a comprehensive analysis of climate and tectonic influences on terrestrial processes of representative regions during the Quaternary. Most of the authors are South American researchers and also members of the IFG and the project, being some of the first authors earlier career researchers.This volume pretends to integrate some advances related to the distinction of features caused by major climatic changes from environmental variations induced by local or regional factors such as volcano-tectonic forcings along some representative regions and on a regional scale. These are very important to enhance integrated analyses of the exogenic versus endogenic processes interplay on the Quaternary landscape evolution for more accurate palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. Not all of the papers of this volume refer to interactions occurring in the same space or time, but some of the contributions focus on some processes that can trigger or enhance a different process. Numerical estimates of climate driven surface and/or tectonic processes interplaying in different geological environments of the continent are included in some papers.