Since its separation from Africa at ~150 Ma and from India at ~90 Ma, Madagascar has its own geological, geomorphic and biogeographic histories, providing an exceptional opportunity for investigating the relationship between the region’s landscape evolution and its biogeography. This project will recover the long-term topographic history of Madagascar for the past 150 million years, based on inversion of the sedimentary records, thermochronological data and the present-day topography. The modelled landscape will reproduce evolution of the island’s stream networks and drainage basin geometry, which will be used to test existing hypotheses of the Malagasy biogeographic evolution.

Project main investigators: Ruohong Jiao and Jean Braun