All about the ‘young’ Indian Ocean
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The Wildlife and Nature Protection Society’s monthly lecture this August will be on, ‘The birth of the Indian Ocean’. It will be delivered by Prof. Mathias Harzhauser on August 18 at 6 p.m. at the Dutch Burgher Union (DBU) hall, 114, Reid Avenue, Colombo 4 (Thunmulla Junction).
The Indian Ocean is a young sea – geologically speaking. It is the heritage of the vast Tethys Ocean, which formed during the Mesozoic Era. Some million years later, during the Eocene and Oligocene, this marine realm was successively narrowed by the counter clockwise northward movement of Africa. In addition, India made its way from southern Gondwana towards its modern position during Cretaceous to Eocene times, thus dividing a part of the sea into the western Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal in the east. During the early Miocene, the Arabian Peninsula became a land bridge, uniting Africa with Eurasia, stimulating exchange of mammal faunas between both continents. African elephants and apes arrived in Europe and Eurasian pigs appeared in Africa. These geodynamic processes were also of major impact for the marine biosphere.
Prof.Dr. Mathias Harzhauser is head of the Geological-Palaeontological Department and is also lecturer at the Universities of Graz and Vienna.
His main topics are the paleobiogeography, paleogeography and stratigraphy of the Tethys-Realm during the last 30 million years. He is an expert on the systematics and taxonomy of Miocene and Oligocene molluscs but applied also geochemical and geophysical methods to decipher the climatic history of Eurasia. During the last decade, his working group – under the leadership of Prof. Werner Piller from Graz University – expanded the research to the Indian Ocean and worked in Iran, Oman, Tanzania, and in northern and southern India. In the current project, new data on the marine history of the Bay of Bengal will be collected by fieldtrips in Assam and Myanmar. Within this project Sri Lanka is a perfect link between the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal.