Well-preserved, actively deforming folds in the Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan provide a natural laboratory for the study of the evolution of thrust-related folds. The uplifted limbs of these folds comprise weakly indurated Cenozoic strata that mantle well-lithified Palaeozoic bedrock. Their contact is a regionally extensive unconformity that provides a persistent and readily traceable marker horizon....

Mountains, ocean currents, forests, and swamps have played an important role in regulating global climate for hundreds of millions of years, but the truly novel event of the Cenozoic was the evolution and expansion of grasslands, with their uniquely coevolved grasses and grazers. Neogene expansion of the climatic and geographic range of grasslands at the expense of woodlands is now revealed by ...

E volution has done wonders with mass extinctions. Organic diversity has rebuilt itself at least five times during the history of life on Earth, fashioning novelty from the organic remnants of each catastrophe (1). Modern biodiversity arose from a global extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period (the ‘‘K-T’’ extinction) that probably was caused by an asteroid or comet impact. This pe...

It has been proposed that Oligo-Miocene regional uplift of Madagascar was generated and is maintained by mantle dynamical processes. Expressions include flat-lying Upper Cretaceous-Paleogene marine limestones crop out at elevations hundreds meters along the western seaboard emergent Quaternary coral-rich terraces rim coastline. Here, we explore history subcrustal topographic support through a c...

Stable and radiogenic isotopic and sedimentological data from sub-Antarctic deep sea sediment cores reveal a temporal link between changes in seawater SrrSr ratios and major episodes of late Eocene–early Oligocene climate change. The SrrSr records show two major inflections, one at 38–39 Ma near the middlerlate Eocene boundary, followed by another at 33.4 Ma. Similarly, the oxygen isotope, ice-...