The role of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in greenhouse warming and climate change remains controversial. During the warmth of the early-mid Pliocene, we find evidence for enhanced thermocline tilt and cold upwelling in the equatorial Pacific, consistent with the prevalence of a La Niña-like state, rather than the proposed persistent warm El Niño-like conditions. Our Pliocene paleothermom...

Enigmatic glassy materials (escorias) and red bricklike materials (tierras cocidas) occur at a restricted stratigraphic level (the top of the Chapadmalal Formation). Materials from one locality near Mar del Plata are attributed to a mid-Pliocene impact event with a radiometric and magnetostratigraphic age of 3.3 million years ago (Ma). An extinction of endemic fauna (including the glyptodonts a...

The preservation, age, and stratigraphic relation of an in situ ashfall layer with an underlying desert pavement in Arena Valley, southern Victoria Land, indicate that a cold-desert climate has persisted in Arena Valley during the past 4.3 million years. These data indicate that the present East Antarctic Ice Sheet has endured for this time and that average temperatures during the Pliocene in A...

Abstract A fragmentary mandible from the early Pliocene of Vera Basin is here investigated to clarify its taxonomic position. The studied specimen assigned Pliorhinus megarhinus , documented in Europe latest Miocene mid-Pliocene. morphometrical comparison reveals that this taxon larger than Stephanorhinus etruscus and S. jeanvireti but overlaps with Dihoplus schleiermacheri . P. D. differ some ...

There is significant debate over the rates and types of fluvial activity at the Plio-Pleistocene boundary in the hyperarid Atacama Desert of Chile. To quantify fluvial processes and help resolve this debate, we measure terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) (Be and Ne) concentration depth profiles in three settings representing a chronosequence: (1) a late Pliocene alluvial fan representative of ...

This paper reports the fossil zokors (Myospalacinae) collected from the lower Pliocene (~4.4 Ma) of Zanda Basin, southwestern Tibet, which is the first record in the hinterland of Tibetan Plateau within the Himalayan Range. Materials include 29 isolated molars belonging to Prosiphneus eriksoni (Schlosser, 1924) by having characters including large size, highly fused roots, upper molars of ortho...

QUILTY, P.G., 1996 (xi): The Pliocene environment of Antarctica. In Banks, M.R. & Brown, M.]. (Eds): CLiMA TIC SUCCESSION AND GLACIAL HISTORY OF THESOUTHERN HEMISPHERE OVER THE LAST FlVEMlLLlON YEARS. Pap. Proc. R Soc. Tasm. 130(2): 1-8. ISSN 0080-4703. Australian Antarctic Division, Channel Highway, Kingston, Tasmania, Australia 7050, and Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, University of Ta...