Tertiary rocks
Major subdivisions of the Tertiary System

Classically, the Cenozoic Era was divided into the Tertiary and Quaternary periods, separated at the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (formerly set at 1.8 million years ago); however, by the late 20th century many authorities considered the terms Tertiary and Quaternary to be obsolete. In 2005 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) decided to recommend keeping the Tertiary and Quaternary periods as units in the geologic time scale, but only as sub-eras within the Cenozoic Era. By 2009 the larger intervals (periods and epochs) of the Cenozoic had been formalized by the ICS and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). The ICS redivided the Cenozoic Era into the Paleogene Period (65.5–23 5 million to 23 million years ago) and , the Neogene Period (23 million to 2.6 million years ago), and the Quaternary Period (2.6 million years ago to the present). These divisions do not directly coincide with boundary years of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods. Under this paradigm, the Paleogene and Neogene span the interval formerly occupied by the Tertiary. The Paleogene Period, the older oldest of the two three divisions, commences at the onset of the Cenozoic Era and includes the Paleocene Epoch (65.5–555 million to 55.8 million years ago), the Eocene Epoch (55.8–338 million to 33.9 million years ago), and the Oligocene Epoch (33.9–23 9 million to 23 million years ago); the . The Neogene spans the interval between the beginning of the Miocene Epoch (23–523 million to 5.3 million years ago) and the present. In the ICS scheme, the Tertiary sub-era extends from the onset of the Cenozoic Era through the Piacenzian Age (3.6–2.end of the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago). The Quaternary Period begins at the base of the Pliocene Pleistocene Epoch (52.3–1.8 million 6 million to 11,700 years ago). This substitution of the terms Paleogene and Neogene for Tertiary and Quaternary, however, is still not universally accepted in the scientific community and continues through the Holocene Epoch (11,700 years ago to the present).

Precise stratigraphic positions for the boundaries of the various traditional Tertiary series were not specified by early workers in the 19th century. It is only in more recent times that the international geologic community has formulated a philosophical framework for stratigraphy. By specifying the lower limits of rock units deposited during successive increments of geologic time at designated points in the rock record (called stratotypes), geologists have established a series of calibration points, called Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSPs), at which time and rock coincide. These boundary stratotypes are the linchpins of global chronostratigraphic units—essentially, the points of reference that mark time within the rock—and serve as the point of departure for global correlation.

Several boundary stratotypes have been identified within Tertiary rocks. The Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, boundary has been stratotypified in Tunisia in North Africa. (To many scholarsIncreasingly, this boundary is also known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-P, boundary.) Its estimated age is 65.5 million years. The Paleocene-Eocene boundary has an estimated age of 55.8 million years; its GSSP is located near Luxor, Egypt. In the early 1990s the Eocene-Oligocene boundary was stratotypically established in southern Italy, with a currently estimated age of approximately 33.9 million years. The Oligocene-Miocene boundary (which also corresponds to the boundary between the Paleogene and Neogene systems) has been stratotyped in Carrosio, Italy; its age has been calculated at roughly 23 million years old. The GSSP associated with the Miocene-Pliocene boundary is located in Sicily and has been dated to about 5.3 million years ago, although the location of this boundary may be repositioned in the future. Although traditionally the The boundary between the Tertiary Pliocene and Quaternary systems was placed at the boundary between the Pleistocene and Pliocene epochs, more recently it has been placed within the later part of the Pliocene Series, at the base of the Gelasian Stage. This boundary , separating the Neogene and Quaternary systems, has been stratotyped in Sicily near the town of Gela and dated to approximately 2.6 million years ago.

Occurrence and distribution of Tertiary deposits


Global sea levels have fallen gradually by about 300 metres (about 1,000 feet) over the past 100 million years, but superimposed upon that trend is a higher-order series of globally fluctuating increases and decreases (that is, transgressions and regressions) in sea level. These fluctuations vary with a periodicity of several million years; where they have occurred along passive (that is, tectonically stable) continental margins, they have left a record of marginal marine, brackish accumulations that overlap with continental sedimentary deposits in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, southern Australia, and the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains of North America. In most regions, Paleogene seas extended farther inland than did those of the Neogene. In fact, the most extensive transgression of the Tertiary is that of the Lutetian Age (Middle Eocene), about 49–40 million years ago. During that interval, the Tethys Sea expanded onto the continental margins of Africa and Eurasia and left extensive deposits of nummulitic rocks, which are made up of shallow-water carbonates. Sediments of Tertiary age are widely developed on the deep ocean floor and on elevated seamounts as well. In the shallower parts of the ocean (above depths of 4.5 km [about 3 miles]), sediments are calcareous (made of calcium carbonate), siliceous (derived from silica), or both, depending on local productivity. Below 4.5 km the sediments are principally siliceous or inorganic, as in the case of red clay, due to dissolution of calcium carbonate.

Nonmarine Tertiary sedimentary and volcanic deposits are widespread in North America, particularly in the intermontane basins west of the Mississippi River. During the Neogene, volcanism and terrigenous deposition extended almost to the Pacific coast. In South America, thick nonmarine clastic sequences (conglomerates, sandstones, and shales) occur in the mobile tectonic belt of the Andes Mountains and along their eastern front; these sequences extend eastward for a considerable distance into the Amazon basin. Tertiary marine deposits occur along the eastern margins of Brazil and Argentina, and they were already known to English naturalist Charles Darwin during his exploration of South America from 1832 to 1834.

Volcanism and orogenesis

Volcanism has continued throughout the Cenozoic on land and at the major oceanic ridges, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise, where new seafloor is continuously generated and carried away laterally by seafloor spreading. Iceland, which was formed in the middle Miocene, is one of the few places where the processes that occur at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge can be observed today.

Two of the most extensive volcanic outpourings recorded in the geologic record occurred during the Tertiary. About 67–66 million years ago, near the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, massive outpourings of basaltic lava formed the Deccan Traps of India. About 55 million years ago, near the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, massive explosive volcanism took place in northwestern Scotland, northern Ireland, the Faeroe Islands, East Greenland, and along the rifted continental margins on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. Volcanic activity in the North Atlantic was associated with the rifting and separation of Eurasia from North America, which occurred on a line between Scandinavia and Greenland and left a stratigraphic record in the marine sedimentary basin of England and in ash deposits as far south as the Bay of Biscay. In both the Deccan and North Atlantic, comparable volumes of extensive basalts in the amount of 10,000,000 cubic km (about 2,400,000 cubic miles) were erupted.

The well-known volcanics of the Massif Central of south-central France, which figured so prominently in early (18th-century) investigations into the nature of igneous rocks, are of Oligocene age, as are those located in central Germany. The East African Rift System preserves a record of mid-to-late Tertiary rifting and the separation event that eventually led to the formation of a marine seaway linking the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean.

The circum-Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an active tectonic belt that extends from the Philippines through Japan and around the west coast of North and South America, was subject to seismic activity and andesitic volcanism throughout much of the Tertiary. The extensive Columbia Plateau basalts were extruded over Washington and Oregon during the Miocene, and many of the volcanoes of Alaska, Oregon, southern Idaho, and northeastern California date to the Late Tertiary. Active volcanism occurred in the newly uplifted Rocky Mountains during the early part of the Tertiary, whereas in the southern Rocky Mountains and Mexico volcanic activity was more common in the mid- and late Tertiary. The linear volcanic trends, such as the Hawaiian, Emperor, and Line island chains in the central and northwestern Pacific, are trails resulting from the movement of the Pacific Plate over volcanic “hot spots” (that is, magma-generating centres) that are probably fixed deep in Earth’s mantle. The major hot spot island groups such as the Hawaiian (which has been active over the past 30 million years), Galapagos, and Society (which were active during the Miocene) islands are volcanoes that rose from the seafloor. Central America, the Caribbean region, and northern South America were the sites of active volcanism throughout the Cenozoic.

In contrast to the passive-margin sedimentation on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains, the Cordilleran (or Laramide) orogeny in the Late Cretaceous, Paleocene, and Eocene produced a series of upfolded and upthrusted mountains and deep intermontane basins in the area of the Rocky Mountains. Deeply downwarped basins accumulated as much as 2,400 metres (about 8,000 feet) of Paleocene and Eocene sediment in the Green River Basin of southwestern Wyoming and 4,300 metres (about 14,000 feet) of sediment in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah. Other basins ranging from Montana to New Mexico accumulated similar but thinner packages of nonmarine fluvial and lacustrine sediments rich in fossil mammals and fish. In the Oligocene and Miocene the influences of the cordilleras, or mountain chains, on what is now the western United States had ceased, and the basins were gradually filled to the top by sediments and abundant volcanic ash deposits from eruptions in present-day Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. These basins were exhumed during the old Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary (about 1.8 million years ago) with renewed uplift of the long-buried Rocky Mountains, along with uplift of the Colorado Plateau, producing steep stream gradients that resulted in the cutting of the Grand Canyon to a depth of more than 1,800 metres (about 6,000 feet).

Volcanism along the Cascade mountain chain has been active since the late Eocene, as evidenced by the major eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 and subsequent minor eruptions. This volcanism was gradually shut off in California as the movement of plate boundaries changed from one of subduction to a sliding and transform motion (see plate tectonics: Principles of plate tectonics). With the development of the San Andreas Fault system, the western half of California started sliding northward. The Cascade–Sierra Nevada mountain chain began to swing clockwise, causing the extension of the Basin and Range Province in Nevada, Arizona, and western Utah. This crustal extension broke the Basin and Range into a series of north-south-trending fault-block mountains and downdropped basins, which filled with thousands of metres of upper Cenozoic sediment. These fault zones (particularly the Wasatch Fault in central Utah and the San Andreas zone in California) remain active today and are the source of most of the damaging earthquakes in North America. The Andean mountains were uplifted during the Neogene as a result of subduction of the South Pacific beneath the South American continent.

Complex tectonic activity also occurred in Asia and Europe during the Tertiary. The main Alpine orogeny began during the late Eocene and Oligocene and continued throughout much of the Neogene. Major tectonic activity in the eastern North Atlantic (Bay of Biscay) extended into southern France and culminated in the uplift of the Pyrenees in the late Eocene. On the south side of the Tethys, the coastal Atlas Mountains of North Africa experienced major uplift during this time, but the Betic region of southern Spain and the Atlas region of northern Morocco continued to display mirror-image histories of tectonic activity well into the late Neogene. In the Middle East the suturing of Africa and Asia occurred about 18 million years ago. Elsewhere, India had collided with the Asian continent about 45 million years ago, initiating the Himalayan uplift that was to intensify in the late Neogene (that is, Pliocene and Pleistocene ) and culminate in the uplift of the great Plateau of Tibet and the Himalayan mountain range. Major orogenic movement also occurred in the Indonesian-Malaysian-Japanese arc system during the Neogene. In New Zealand, which sits astride the Indian-Australian and Pacific plate boundary, the major tectonic uplift (the Kaikoura orogeny) of the Southern Alps began about 10 million years ago.

Sedimentary sequences

Northwestern Europe contains a number of Tertiary marine basins that essentially rim the North Sea basin, itself the site of active subsidence during the Paleogene and infilling during the Neogene. The marine Hampshire and London basins, the Paris Basin, the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the North German Basin have become the standard for comparative studies of the Paleogene part of the Cenozoic, whereas the Mediterranean region (Italy) has become the standard for the Neogene. The Tertiary record of the Paris Basin is essentially restricted to the Paleogene strata (namely, those of Paleocene–late Oligocene age), whereas scattered Pliocene-Pleistocene deposits occur in England and Belgium above the Paleogene. The strata are relatively thin, nearly horizontal, and often highly fossiliferous, particularly in the middle Eocene calcaire grossier (freshwater limestone) of the Paris Basin, from which a molluscan fauna of more than 500 species has been described. The Paris Basin is a roughly oval-shaped basin centred on Paris, whereas the Hampshire and London basins lie to the southwest and northeast of London, respectively. The London Basin and the Anglo-Belgian Basin were part of a single sedimentary basin across what is now the English Channel during the early part of the Paleogene.

The total Paleogene stratigraphic succession in these basins is less than 300 metres (about 980 feet), and it is made up of clays, marls, sands, carbonates, lignites, and gypsum. These layers reflect alternations of marine, brackish, lacustrine, and terrestrial environments of deposition. The alternating transgressions and regressions of the sea have left a complex sedimentary record punctuated by numerous unconformities (interruptions in the deposition of sedimentary rock) and associated temporal hiatuses, and the correlation of these various units and events has challenged stratigraphers since the early 19th century. The integration of biostratigraphy, paleomagnetic stratigraphy, and tephrochronology (respectively, using fossils, magnetic properties, and ash layers to establish the age and succession of rocks) has resulted in a refined correlation of rock layers in these separate basins.

In North America, by contrast, extensive Tertiary sediments occur on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and extend around the margin of the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatán Peninsula, a distance of more than 5,000 km (about 3,100 miles). Seaward these deposits can be traced from the Atlantic Coastal Plain to the continental margin and rise and in the Gulf Coastal Plain into the subsurface formations of this oil-bearing province of the Gulf of Mexico. During the Paleocene the Gulf Coast extended northward roughly 2,000 km (about 1,200 miles) in a feature called the Mississippi Embayment, which reached as far as southwestern North Dakota and Montana; there marine deposits known as the Cannonball Formation can be seen as outcrops of sandstone. Although eroded between northwestern South Dakota and southern Illinois, marine outcrops continue southward to the present coastline and continue in the subsurface of the Gulf of Mexico. Tertiary sediments with a thickness in excess of 6,000 metres (about 20,000 feet) are estimated to lie beneath the continental margin along the northern Gulf of Mexico. In the Tampico Embayment of eastern Mexico, thicknesses of more than 3,000 metres (about 10,000 feet) have been estimated for the Paleocene Velasco Formation alone, which developed under conditions of active subsidence and associated rapid deposition. Exposures in the Atlantic Coastal Plain and most of the Gulf Coastal Plain are of Paleogene age, but considerable thicknesses of Neogene sediment occur in offshore wells in front of the Mississippi delta, where thicknesses in excess of 10,000 metres (about 33,000 feet) have been recorded for the Neogene alone. Sediments are dominantly calcareous in the Florida region and become more marly and eventually sandy to the west, reflecting the input of terrigenous matter transported seasonally by the Mississippi River and its precursors. Because of general faunal and floral similarities, it is possible to make relatively precise stratigraphic correlations in the Paleogene between the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plain region and the basins in northwestern Europe.

Establishing Tertiary boundaries

The name Tertiary was introduced by Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino in 1760 as the second youngest division of Earth’s rocks. The oldest rocks were the primitive, or “primary,” igneous and metamorphic rocks (composed of schists, granites, and basalts) that formed the core of the high mountains in Europe. Arduino designated rocks composed predominantly of shales and limestones in northern Italy as elements of the fossiliferous “secondary,” or Mesozoic, group. He considered younger groups of fossiliferous sedimentary rocks, found chiefly at lower elevations, as “tertiary” rocks and the smaller pebbles and gravel that covered them as “quaternary” rocks. Although originally intended as a descriptive generalization of rock types, many of Arduino’s contemporaries and successors gave these categories a temporal connotation and equated them with rocks formed prior to, during, and after the Noachian deluge. In 1810 French mineralogist, geologist, and naturalist Alexandre Brongniart included all the sedimentary deposits of the Paris Basin in his terrains tertiares, or Tertiary. Soon thereafter all rocks younger than Mesozoic in western Europe were called Tertiary.

The subdivision of the Tertiary into smaller units was originally based on fossil faunas of western Europe that were known to 19th-century natural scientists. These faunas primarily contained mollusks exhibiting varying degrees of similarity with modern types. At the same time, the science of stratigraphy was in its infancy, and the primary focus of its earliest practitioners was to use the newly discovered sequential progression of fossils in layered sedimentary rocks to establish a global sequence of temporally ordered stages. Scottish geologist Charles Lyell employed a simple statistical measure based on the relative percentages of living species of mollusks to fossil mollusks found in different layers of Tertiary rocks. These percentages had been compiled by Lyell’s colleague and friend Gérard-Paul Deshayes, a French geologist who had amassed a collection of more than 40,000 mollusks and was preparing a monograph on the mollusks of the Paris Basin.

In 1833 Lyell divided the Tertiary into four subdivisions (from older to younger): Eocene, Miocene, the “older Pliocene,” and the “newer Pliocene.” (The latter was renamed Pleistocene in 1839.) The Eocene contained about 3 percent of the living mollusk species, the Miocene about 20 percent, the older Pliocene more than one-third and often over 50 percent, and the newer Pliocene about 90 percent. Lyell traveled extensively and had a broad and comprehensive understanding of the regional geology for his day. He understood, for example, that rocks of the Tertiary were unevenly distributed over Europe and that there were no rocks of the younger part of the period in the Paris Basin. He used the deposits in the Paris, Hampshire, and London basins as typical for the Eocene. For the Miocene he used the sediments of the Loire Basin near Touraine, the deposits in the Aquitaine Basin near Bordeaux in southwestern France, and the Bormida River valley and Superga near Turin, Italy. The sub-Apennine formations of northern Italy were used for the older Pliocene, and the marine strata in the Gulf of Noto, on the Island of Ischia (also in Italy), and near Uddevalla (in Sweden) were used for the newer Pliocene.

The limits between Lyell’s Tertiary subdivisions were not rigidly specified, and Lyell himself recognized the approximate and imperfect nature of his scheme. Indeed, in their original form, Lyell’s subdivisions would today be termed biostratigraphic units (bodies of rocks characterized by particular fossil assemblages) rather than chronostratigraphic units (bodies of rocks deposited during a specific interval of time).

Subsequent stratigraphic studies in northern Europe showed that deposits were included variously in the upper Eocene or lower Miocene by different geologists of the day. This situation led German geologist H.E. Beyrich, in 1854, to create the term Oligocene for rocks in the North German Basin and Mainz Basin and to insert it between the Eocene and the Miocene in the stratigraphic scheme. As originally proposed, the Oligocene included the Tongrian and Rupelian stages as well as strata that subsequently formed the basis for the Chattian Stage. The Tongrian is no longer used as a standard unit, its place being taken by the Rupelian.

The term Paleocene was proposed by German paleobotanist Wilhelm P. Schimper in 1874 on the basis of fossil floras in the Paris Basin that he considered intermediate between Cretaceous and Eocene forms. Typical strata include the sands of Bracheux, the travertines of Sézanne, and the lignites and sandstones of Soissons. The problem of the Paleocene is that, of all the chronostratigraphic units of the Tertiary, it alone is defined on the basis of nonmarine strata, making recognition of its upper limit and general correlation difficult elsewhere. Acceptance of the term Paleocene into the general system of stratigraphic names was irregular, and only in 1939 did the United States Geological Survey, general arbiter of standard stratigraphic nomenclature in North America, formally accept it. The Danian Stage was proposed by the Swiss geologist Pierre Jean Édouard Desor in 1846 for chalk deposits in Denmark. It was assigned to the Cretaceous by virtue of the similarity of its invertebrate megafossils to those of the latest Cretaceous elsewhere. However, since the late 1950s, micropaleontologists have recognized that calcareous marine plankton (foraminiferans and coccolith-bearing nannoplankton) exhibit a major taxonomic change at the boundary between the Maastrichtian (uppermost Cretaceous) Stage and the Danian (lowermost Tertiary) Stage. The Danian is now widely regarded as being the oldest stage of the Cenozoic.

In 1948 the 18th International Geological Congress placed the base of the Pleistocene at the base of the marine strata of the Calabrian Stage of southern Italy, using the initial appearance of northern or cool-water invertebrate faunas in Mediterranean marine strata as the marker. Subsequent studies showed that the type section was ill-chosen and that the base of the Calabrian Stage was equivalent to much younger levels within the Pleistocene. A newly designated stratotype section was chosen at Vrica in Calabria, and for a time the base of the Pleistocene was found comparable to a level dated to nearly 1.8 million years ago. Officially, the oldest interval of the Pleistocene remains the Calabrian; however, members of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) and the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), prompted by the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA), were giving serious consideration at the beginning of the 21st century to setting In 2009 the IUGS ratified the decision by the ICS to align the base of the Pleistocene (and thus the top of the Tertiary Neogene System) coincident with the base of the Gelasian Stage.

Correlation of Tertiary strata

The boundaries of the Tertiary were originally only qualitatively estimated on the basis of the percentages of living species of (primarily) mollusks in the succession of marine strata in the western European basins (see above). The need for more precise correlations of Mesozoic and Cenozoic marine strata in Europe led to the concept of stages, which was introduced in 1842 by French paleontologist Alcide d’Orbigny. These stages were originally defined as rock sequences composed of distinctive assemblages of fossils that were believed to change abruptly as a result of major transgressions and regressions of the sea. This methodology has since been improved and refined, but it forms the basis for modern biostratigraphic correlation. Early attempts at global correlations of strata were made by direct comparisons with the faunas in the type areas in Europe; however, it was soon realized that faunal provincialization led to spurious correlations. In 1919 an independent set of percentages for the Indonesian region was proposed, which was subsequently modified into the so-called East India Letter Stage classification system based on the occurrence of taxa of larger foraminiferans.

Since about the mid-1900s, increasing efforts have been made to apply radioisotopic dating techniques to the development of a geochronologic scale, particularly for the Cenozoic Era. The decay of potassium-40 to argon-40 (see potassium-argon dating) has proved very useful in this respect, and refinements in mass spectroscopy and the development of laser-fusion dating involving the decay of argon-40 to argon-39 have resulted in the ability to date volcanic mineral samples in amounts as small as single crystals with a margin of error of less than 1 percent over the span of the entire Cenozoic Era.

Also, since the mid-1960s, investigators have demonstrated that Earth’s magnetic field has undergone numerous reversals in the past. It is known that most rocks pick up and retain the magnetic orientation of the field at the time they are formed through either sedimentary or igneous processes. With the development of techniques for measuring the rock’s original orientation of magnetization, a sequence of polarity reversals has been dated for the late Neogene. In addition, a paleomagnetic chronology has been built for the entire Cenozoic. This work is based on the recognition that the magnetic lineations detected in rocks on the ocean floor were formed when basaltic magma had been extruded from the oceanic ridges. Earth’s magnetic polarity undergoes a reversal roughly every 500,000 years, and newly formed rocks assume the ambient magnetic polarity of the time. As a result, strips of normal and reversed polarity that reflect these magnetic reversals can be observed in deep-sea cores. The calibration of the composite geomagnetic polarity succession to time and the relation of this chronology to the isotopic time scale, however, have proved to be the greatest source of disagreement over various current versions of the geologic time scale. Calibrations of a time scale must ultimately be based on the application of meaningful isotopic ages to the succession of polarity intervals and geologic stages. A geochronologic scheme is thus an integration of several methodologies; it makes use of the best attributes of seafloor-spreading history (that is, the pattern of seafloor magnetic anomalies), magnetostratigraphy, and biostratigraphy in the application of relevant isotopic ages to derive a high-resolution and internally consistent time scale. The recent application of cyclical components driven by astronomical phenomena into the stratigraphic record, such as lithological couplets of marl and chalks and fluctuations in the ratios and percentages of fossil taxa, has resulted in fine-tuning the geologic time scale to a resolution of about 5,000 years in the late Neogene.

Micropaleontologists have created a number of zones based on the regional distribution of calcareous plankton (foraminiferans and nannoplankton) and those of the siliceous variety (radiolarians and diatoms), making it possible to correlate sediments from the high northern to high southern latitudes by way of the equatorial region. The resulting high-resolution zonal biostratigraphy and its calibration to an integrated geochronology provide the framework in which a true historical geology has become feasible.