Abstract
A wide half-circle of crystalline and sedimentary highlands surrounds the “Sertaneja depression,” opening onto the Equatorial Atlantic transform margin . Intersected seaward by offset elements of a 600 km long escarpment which overlooks coastal lowlands, it contains a roughly concentric system of erosion plains and scattered mountains shaped into a Precambrian basement whose geology is organized around a large transcurrent shear zone system of the Brasiliano orogen . The low surfaces slope gently seaward, disappearing below a coastal strip of Cretaceous and/or Tertiary sediments. The distribution of marginal highlands is related to the intersection of a failed rift zone by the continental margin. The discontinuous outlines of the marginal escarpment and its morphology strongly depend on the structures of the basement and of the aborted rift zone. The analysis of drainage patterns and of relationships between tectonic structures and landforms created by differential erosion allow an evaluation of the determining influence of superposed structural heritages in the present landscapes. Among these structural heritages, the numerous shear zones formed at depth in ductile regime during the Brasiliano orogeny play one of the most important roles, as well by focusing the later brittle deformations when conveniently oriented with regard to the stress fields, as by forming weakness zones when exposed to erosion.
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Peulvast, JP., Bétard, F. (2015). Morphostructural Patterns: Influence of an Aborted Rift Zone on the Regional Organization of Landforms. In: Landforms and Landscape Evolution of the Equatorial Margin of Northeast Brazil. Springer Earth System Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18203-2_3
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