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eEarth, 2, 27-34, 2007
www.electronic-earth.net/2/27/2007/ doi:10.5194/ee-2-27-2007 © Author(s) 2007. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. |
17 Apr 2007
1Department of Geography, Harran University, 63300 Şanlıurfa, Turkey
2Isotope Geosciences Laboratory, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA
3Department of Geology, Çukurova University, 01330 Adana, Turkey
4Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, The Open University, Eldon House, Gosforth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE3 3PW, UK
5School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 7RU, UK
6Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
7School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
8Birmingham Archaeology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
9School of Earth Sciences and Geography, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
Abstract. We report gravel of the River Euphrates, capped by basalt that is Ar-Ar dated to ~9 Ma, at Shireen in northern Syria. This gravel, preserved by the erosion-resistant basalt, allows us for the first time to reconstruct the history of this major river during the Late Miocene. In response to progressive regional surface uplift, the Euphrates extended SE by ~800 km between the early Middle Miocene, when the coast was near Kahramanmaraş in southern Turkey, and the Pliocene, when it lay in western Iraq, east of the Arabian Platform uplands.
Citation: Demir, T., Pringle, M., Yurtmen, S., Westaway, R., Bridgland, D., Beck, A., Challis, K., and Rowbotham, G.: Location of the River Euphrates in the Late Miocene; dating of terrace gravel at Shireen, Syria, eEarth, 2, 27-34, doi:10.5194/ee-2-27-2007, 2007.