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RUDDIMAN, W. F. (ed.) 1997. Tectonic Uplift and Climate Change. xxi + 535 pp. New York, London: Plenum Press. Price US $115.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 306 45642 7
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Raymo, Maureen E. Prell, Warren L. |
| Copyright Year | 1998 |
| Abstract | Early in their education all geologists have been made aware of the local and occasionally regional impact that mountain ranges have on the climate, and since Köppen & Wegener’s great work on climate of the 1920s ancient mountain ranges have appeared decorated with rain shadows on palaeo-environmental maps. But having said that, we have accounted for just about all of the interaction between tectonicists and palaeo-climatologists until very recently. Until the late 1980s, in fact, when a high-visibility swarm of papers by Bill Ruddiman, Maureen Raymo, Warren Prell, John Kutzbach and a few others greatly enlarged the stage for the study of the tectonic impact on climate by proposing (claiming might be a better word) that the onset of the northern hemisphere ice age was caused by middle to late Cenozoic uplift of the Rocky Mountain and Tibetan plateaus. In particular they showed how the rise of the Tibetan plateau would have diverted the northern jetstream and the Asiatic monsoons to increase the aridity south of the mid-latitudes and turn the climate substantially colder to the north. However, their emphasis on the possible connection between rising mountains and the start of the northern ice age was perhaps a slight tactical mistake, because the first response, mainly by tectonicists, focused almost entirely, and with some hostility, on the question of whether the times of uplift really corresponded to the start of the glaciation. I suspect that the originators of this revival of a truly important concept may well have felt somewhat anguished when their main point, that major climate changes can result from high uplift in critical regions, got rather lost in trivial debate. Still, the much broader consequences of the proposition gradually sank in, in part due to a clear and persuasive paper in the Scientific American (264: 66, 1991) that set forth in detail just what the effect of a high plateau on climate could have been, while enlarging on numerous aspects other than starting hemispheric ice sheets. Since then, the winds have shifted considerably and a new era has dawned in which increasingly tectonics is recognized as an important forcing factor in global climate change. This book is a timely and comprehensive assessment of where we stand today, presenting, as it does, a sweeping overview of the relations between tectonic uplift and the circulation of atmosphere and ocean, global climate change, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, chemical weathering, sediment and carbon burial, physical weathering and denudation, and the many mutual interactions of all of those, displayed on the seductive (and challenging) diagram that decorates the cover of this book. Even the vegetation is included there, although perhaps a bit on the sidelines, but I wonder how the designer missed the opportunity to match a recent claim that the asteroidal destruction of the dinosaurs cleared the stage for the mammals and so was responsible for our presence on the planet. Surely, the consequences for human evolution of the widespread conversion of forests into savannah in the later Cenozoic justifies an analogous suggestion that we are here because of the collision between India and Asia. The perspective of this book is wide-ranging and allimportant and accordingly the contents, which spread across the width and length of multi-disciplinary earth studies, are of keen interest to a very wide range of geological specialists. Even so, the fact that among the 29 contributors to the text the names of the original five appear 15 times in various combinations behind chapter headings shows that it is still early days in the development of the subject. The book is subdivided into five well-chosen parts that make it quite easy to find one’s way through the daunting 515 pages of text to the subjects of one’s particular interest. Following a thoughtful and very rewarding first chapter that combines the function of an introduction with that of an extended abstract under the deceptively bland title ‘Introduction to the Uplift–Climate Connection’, three chapters deal from a variety of perspectives with the evidence for Cenozoic uplift of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau (Copeland), the central Andes (Jordan, Reynolds III & Erikson) and parts of eastern and southern Africa (Partridge). The absence of a similar discourse on the rise of the Rocky Mountain plateau is conspicuous, however, and most unfortunate in view of the important role the plateau plays in many subsequent presentations, more unfortunate than the absence of any one or two of the subsequent chapters would have been. I sincerely hope that the Editor, clearly conscious of this defect, succeeds in persuading some appropriate expert to provide a substitute that we may find in a convenient widely accessible journal. Next follow no fewer than five modelling studies of the impact of uplift on climate. They deal with mountains and mid-latitude aridity (Broccoli & Manabe), their effects on the ocean–atmosphere circulation (Rind, Russell & Ruddiman), on global and regional hydrology (Kutzbach, Ruddiman & Prell) and the Tibet–Himalaya impact on the monsoon (Prell & Kutzbach); the set closes with a particularly interesting experiment using coupled climate and biodynamic models to assess the climatic effects of orogeny and CO2 (Ruddiman, Kutzbach & Prentice) on the plant cover. The tone of all chapters is decently conservative with a happy balance between forward looking interpretations and well-chosen cautions to the reader that suits their potentially controversial subject matter. Ten chapters on the sedimentary and geochemical evidence for, and the consequences of, climate changes induced by uplift occupy the longest part of the book. The chapters cover fluvial sediment discharge (Milliman), silicate weathering rates and the 87Sr/86Sr record (Blum), weathering and erosion fluxes (Derry & France-Lanord), vegetation change and CO2 (Cerling), weathering yields from basement and orogenic terrains (Edmond & Sook), SiO2 weathering and climate (Berner & Berner), carbon cycle models (Raymo), the marine osmium isotope record and global tectonics and climate (Turekian & Pegram), global chemical erosion and weatherability (Kump & Arthur) and nearly fifty pages on the marine 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O records, alkalinity fluxes and climate models (McCauley & DePaolo). The contributions obviously vary in level, completeness, originality, degree of penetrating thought and reader-friendliness, but together, however, they constitute a treatise on climate, relief and weathering that has to the best of my knowledge no equal today and therefore all by itself justifies acquisition of the whole book. Geol. Mag. 135 (6), 1998, pp. 819–842. Printed in the United Kingdom © 1998 Cambridge University Press 819 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://static.cambridge.org/resource/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20180418102420701-0352:S0016756898621506:S001675689800150Xa.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
