Still time to apply to our session on #contourites in #activemargins (or a more generic 'sister' proposal on contourites) at the upcoming ISC conference in New Zealand. Deadline on the 16th of May! See the links below...

confer.co.nz/isc2026/down...

confer.co.nz/isc2026/call...

Map of the reconstruction below!

This pushes back the age of initial opening of the opening of the gateway to the mid-Aptian, around 117 million years ago. This also suggests that this early opening impacted global climate, with black shale deposited in these new, narrow basins leading to short-lived global cooling.

In this area, we see evidence for incredible, multi-km scale sediment waves in the seismic data, that document saline waters flowing out from the restricted equatorial basins, into the Central Atlantic - similar to the Mediterranean Outflow Water in the present