有关研究报告指出，关于侵蚀的地质记录表明，在过去500万年全球沉积速度增加了4倍。我们值得对这些报告做了一个全球性的解释。人们所提供的解释包括造山运动和全球变冷速度的增加。
现在，Jane Willenbring 和Friedhelm von Blanckenburg重新分析了原始数据，并利用关于铍同位素比的海洋记录，来获取过去侵蚀速度和岩石风化的一个间接测量结果。关于过去1200万年全球侵蚀速度的增加或风化材料的突增他们都没有发现明确证据。他们提出，新生代全球变冷一定有其他原因，而的确出现的造山运动对全球侵蚀或风化通量几乎没有影响。 （生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原文出处：
Nature doi:10.1038/nature09044
Long-term stability of global erosion rates and weathering during late-Cenozoic cooling
Jane K. Willenbring1 & Friedhelm von Blanckenburg1
1 Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ, Section 3.4: Earth Surface Geochemistry, Telegrafenberg, D-14473 Potsdam, Germany
Over geologic timescales, CO2 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 conditions1. Changes in this balance have been attributed to changes in topographic relief, where varying rates of continental rock weathering and erosion1, 2 are superimposed on fluctuations in organic carbon burial3. Geological strata provide an indirect yet imperfectly preserved record of this change through changing rates of sedimentation1, 2, 4. Widespread observations of a recent (0–5-Myr) fourfold increase in global sedimentation rates require a global mechanism to explain them4, 5, 6. Accelerated uplift and global cooling have been given as possible causes2, 4, 6, 7, but because of the links between rates of erosion and the correlated rate of weathering8, 9, an increase in the drawdown of CO2 that is predicted to follow may be the cause of global climate change instead2. However, globally, rates of uplift cannot increase everywhere in the way that apparent sedimentation rates do4, 10. Moreover, proxy records of past atmospheric CO2 provide no evidence for this large reduction in recent CO2 concentrations11, 12. 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 record13. As evidence, we recast the ocean dissolved 10Be/9Be isotope system as a weathering proxy spanning the past ~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.
