This Special Issue focuses on Triassic basin initiation and evolution and their infill-architecture along the western and eastern borderlands of the Central and North Atlantic region. The Pangaean Supercontinent was in place by the Late Carboniferous and expanded in earliest Mesozoic times. However, during the Late Palaeozoic to early Mesozoic a massive rift zone developed within Pangaea and Permo-Triassic basins were initiated across Western Europe and the Atlantic Margins due to late spreading collapse of the Variscan orogen, southward propagation of the Arctic rift system, opening of the neo-Tethys area and residual Permian thermal subsidence. The breakup of Pangaea splintered this rift zone into fragments, separated and preserved on the passive margins of eastern North America, northwestern Africa, Iberia and Europe. It produced one of the worlds' largest rift systems-several thousand kilometres long and containing a Permo-Triassic suite of mainly continental clastic sediments in excess of 6 km in thickness. This rifting phase was responsible for the creation of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, a short-lived magmatic episode, that is associated with the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, and one of the largest massextinction events.
The rifting of the Pangaean Supercontinent resulted in two major Triassic palaeogeographic domains being established which are defined on the basis of the broad lithostratigraphic attributes of their basin infills: a Tethyan domain, influenced by the development of neo-Tethys, and an Atlantic (Boreal) domain along the North Atlantic borders and the Northern North Sea where most rift basins display continental sedimentation, mainly fluvial, aeolian and lacustrine in nature.
The Atlantic domain constitutes the subject matter of this Special Issue (Figure 1). The interaction between the Arctic and Tethyan rifting episodes produced punctuated, extensional events throughout the Permo-Triassic, diachroneity in infill timing and much variability in sediment dispersal patterns within the collage of rift basins. The basins are essentially half-grabens with their major bounding faults (inherited from underlying deep crustal structures) trending generally NE-SW, locally with up to a 10 km dip-slip component. The scale of Pangaea as a single landmass had profound implications for the climatic conditions, which favoured mega-monsoonal circulation patterns. Climatic overprint on the dominant tectonic control of sedimentary architecture in the rift infills is apparent in many of the Central and North Atlantic Borderland basins. In general, two broad phases of sedimentation are recognized: an earlier sand-prone pulse dominated by alluvial fan, large-scale fluvial systems and aeolian deposits, and a later fine-grained association of small-scale ephemeral fluvial, lacustrine mudrocks and evaporitic playa (including halite) sequences. This general lithostratigraphic pattern and correlation can be observed in the basins from Nova Scotia and Morocco to the Northern North Sea and beyond (Figure 2). Thus, the