A major obstacle in understanding the evolution of Cenozoic climate has been the lack of well dated terrestrial evidence from high-latitude, glaciated regions. Here, we report the discovery of exceptionally well preserved fossils of lacustrine and terrestrial organisms from the McMurdo Dry Valleys sector of the Transantarctic Mountains for which we have established a precise radiometric chronology. The fossils, which include diatoms, palynomorphs, mosses, ostracodes, and insects, represent the last vestige of a tundra community that inhabited the mountains before stepped cooling that first brought a full polar climate to Antarctica. Paleoecological analyses, 40 Ar/ 39 Ar analyses of associated ash fall, and climate inferences from glaciological modeling together suggest that mean summer temperatures in the region cooled by at least 8°C between 14.07 ؎ 0.05 Ma and 13.85 ؎ 0.03 Ma. These results provide novel constraints for the timing and amplitude of middle-Miocene cooling in Antarctica and reveal the ecological legacy of this global climate transition.climate change ͉ tundra biota ͉ Dry Valleys ͉ diatoms ͉ ostracods

Over geologic timescales, CO(2) is emitted from the Earth's interior and is removed from the atmosphere by silicate rock weathering and organic carbon burial. This balance is thought to have stabilized greenhouse conditions within a range that ensured habitable conditions. Changes in this balance have been attributed to changes in topographic relief, where varying rates of continental rock weathering and erosion are superimposed on fluctuations in organic carbon burial. Geological strata provide an indirect yet imperfectly preserved record of this change through changing rates of sedimentation. Widespread observations of a recent (0-5-Myr) fourfold increase in global sedimentation rates require a global mechanism to explain them. Accelerated uplift and global cooling have been given as possible causes, but because of the links between rates of erosion and the correlated rate of weathering, an increase in the drawdown of CO(2) that is predicted to follow may be the cause of global climate change instead. However, globally, rates of uplift cannot increase everywhere in the way that apparent sedimentation rates do. Moreover, proxy records of past atmospheric CO(2) provide no evidence for this large reduction in recent CO(2) concentrations. Here we question whether this increase in global weathering and erosion actually occurred and whether the apparent increase in the sedimentation rate is due to observational biases in the sedimentary record. As evidence, we recast the ocean dissolved (10)Be/(9)Be isotope system as a weathering proxy spanning the past approximately 12 Myr (ref. 14). This proxy indicates stable weathering fluxes during the late-Cenozoic era. The sum of these observations shows neither clear evidence for increased erosion nor clear evidence for a pulse in weathered material to the ocean. We conclude that processes different from an increase in denudation caused Cenozoic global cooling, and that global cooling had no profound effect on spatially and temporally averaged weathering rates.

Rainfall scavenges meteoric cosmogenic 10 Be from the atmosphere. 10Be falls to the Earth surface, where it binds tightly to sediment particles in non-acidic soils over the life-span of those soils. As such, meteoric 10 Be has the potential to be an excellent geochemical tracer of erosion and stability of surfaces in a diverse range of natural settings. Meteoric 10 Be has great potential as a recorder of first-order erosion rates and soil residence times. Even though this tracer was first developed in the late 1980s and showed great promise as a geomorphic tool, it was sidelined in the past two decades with the rise of the "sister nuclide", in situ 10 Be, which is produced at a known rate inside quartz minerals. Since these early days, substantial progress has been made in several areas that now shed new light on the applicability of the meteoric variety of this cosmogenic nuclide. Here, we revisit the potential of this tracer and we summarize the progress: (1) the atmospheric production and fallout is now described by numeric models, and agrees with present-day measurements and paleo-archives such as from rain and ice cores; (2) short-term fluctuations in solar modulation of cosmic rays or in the delivery of 10 Be are averaged-out over the time scale soils accumulate; (3) in many cases, the delivery of 10 Be is not dependent on the amount of precipitation; (4) we explore where 10 Be is retained in soils and sediment; (5) we suggest a law to account for the strong grain size dependence that controls adsorption and the measured nuclide concentrations; and (6) we present a set of algebraic expressions that allows calculation of both soil or sediment ages and erosion rates from the inventory of meteoric 10

Although sediment is a natural constituent of rivers, excess loading to rivers and streams is a leading cause of impairment and biodiversity loss. Remedial actions require identification of the sources and mechanisms of sediment supply. This task is complicated by the scale and complexity of large watersheds as well as changes in climate and land use that alter the drivers of sediment supply. Previous studies in Lake Pepin, a natural lake on the Mississippi River, indicate that sediment supply to the lake has increased 10-fold over the past 150 years. Herein we combine geochemical fingerprinting and a suite of geomorphic change detection techniques with a sediment mass balance for a tributary watershed to demonstrate that, although the sediment loading remains very large, the dominant source of sediment has shifted from agricultural soil erosion to accelerated erosion of stream banks and bluffs, driven by increased river discharge. Such hydrologic amplification of natural erosion processes calls for a new approach to watershed sediment modeling that explicitly accounts for channel and floodplain dynamics that amplify or dampen landscape processes. Further, this finding illustrates a new challenge in remediating nonpoint sediment pollution and indicates that management efforts must expand from soil erosion to factors contributing to increased water runoff.