An Examination of Evidence Used to Infer Late Cenozoic "Uplift" of Mountain Belts and other High Terrain: What Scientific Question Does Such Evidence Pose?

Fot virtually every mountain belt and high plateau, as well as for many topographically minor features, a credible, if not outstanding, geologist has asserted that that high tenain lose abruptly in Pliocene and/or Quaternary time. Such suggestions rely on a variety of observations that include paleobotanical finds of plant organs resembling those of taxa that now live lower, recent increases in exhumation, erosion, incision, and/or sediment-accumulation rates, "juventle landscapes," and in some cases no supporting data at all (presumably because the inference has become so widely accepted that supporting evidence is no longer needed). Regions of allegedly recent "uplift" include obviously active belts like the Himalaya and seemingly tectonically dead terrain such as Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, the Rocky Mountains of the Western USA, of any part of Australia, as well as belts, like the western Alps, which might be called senile, it not dead yet because rigor mortis has not yet set in. The lack of a globally synchronous change in rates of plate motion in the past few million years denies any suggestion of a globally synchronous, coordinated rise of high terrain a sensible tectonic cause. Thus, although not all inferences of recent increases in mean elevations (or whatever has been meant by the word "uplift")need be false, most surely are Global climate change offers the only globally synchronous process that could mislead so many geologists to infer a recent rise of high terrain. Deciphering how climate change forged a tectonic signature on the landscape remains a challenge for geomorphologists and tectonic geologists alike.