50 anos da Geologia Isotópica na América do Sul – Destaques do 9º Simpósio-Sul Americano de Geologia Isotópica

Resumo

On April 2014, over 250 members of the South America Earth Sciences community gathered at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for the 9th South American Symposium on Isotope Geology – 9th SSAGI. The symposium is a traditional scientific meeting in South America and it has been organized since 1997 in different countries of our continent, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Colombia. The motivation to hold the 9th SSAGI in São Paulo was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Geochronological Research Center (CPGeo). The establishment of the first K-Ar laboratory in South America at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) was only possible due to Professor John Reynolds’ effort (University of California at Berkeley) and a USA National Science Foundation grant that permitted the acquisition of a mass spectrometer. The center was operated since 1964 by Umberto Cordani, Koji Kawashita, and Gilberto Amaral. Professor Reynolds came to the Universidade de São Paulo for a sabbatical leave and helped to set up the laboratory facilities, obtaining the first K-Ar ages on basalts from the Paraná Basin. Further work permitted the Brazilian team to contribute to the tests of the Continental Drift hypothesis, providing ages to show the fitting of the African and Brazilian continents before the opening of the Atlantic Ocean.