Geological Travel

Brazil Tours / Geology - The Continental Rift of Southeast Brazil is considered one of the outstanding geomorphological and topographical features in eastern America.

It represents an elongate narrow trough of more than 900 km which is composed of a system of taphrogenic basins and grabens that were installed in the Neoproterozoic Ribeira belt during the Cenozoic (55 - 11 Ma).

It was preceded / activated by a series of alkaline magmatic events during the Mesozoic / Cenozoic (82 - 52 Ma).

The alkaline intrusions of this magmatism are nowadays exposed along the main fault lines of the rift (e.g. Passa Quatro (PQ), Itatiaia (IT), Tinguá (TI), Mendanha (MD)).

The central / oriental segment of the rift encompasses the basins of São Paulo (SP), of the Upper Paraíba Valley; Taubaté (TB), Resende (R) and Volta Redonda (VR) and of the Guanabara Graben; Macacu (MC) and Itaboraí.