We review Phanerozoic sea-level changes [543 million years ago (Ma) to the present] on various time scales and present a new sea-level record for the past 100 million years (My). Long-term sea level peaked at 100 ± 50 meters during the Cretaceous, implying that ocean-crust production rates were much lower than previously inferred. Sea level mirrors oxygen isotope variations, reflecting ice-volume change on the 10 4 - to 10 6 -year scale, but a link between oxygen isotope and sea level on the 10 7 -year scale must be due to temperature changes that we attribute to tectonically controlled carbon dioxide variations. Sea-level change has influenced phytoplankton evolution, ocean chemistry, and the loci of carbonate, organic carbon, and siliciclastic sediment burial. Over the past 100 My, sea-level changes reflect global climate evolution from a time of ephemeral Antarctic ice sheets (100 to 33 Ma), through a time of large ice sheets primarily in Antarctica (33 to 2.5 Ma), to a world with large Antarctic and large, variable Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (2.5 Ma to the present).

/pdf/the-phanerozoic-record-of-global-sea-level-change-14696qrujw.pdf

The Phanerozoic Record of Global Sea-Level Change

The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), an instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, has measured the topography, surface roughness, and 1.064-μm reflectivity of Mars and the heights of volatile and dust clouds. This paper discusses the function of the MOLA instrument and the acquisition, processing, and correction of observations to produce global data sets. The altimeter measurements have been converted to both gridded and spherical harmonic models for the topography and shape of Mars that have vertical and radial accuracies of ~1 m with respect to the planet's center of mass. The current global topographic grid has a resolution of 1/64° in latitude × 1/32° in longitude (1 × 2 km^2 at the equator). Reconstruction of the locations of incident laser pulses on the Martian surface appears to be at the 100-m spatial accuracy level and results in 2 orders of magnitude improvement in the global geodetic grid of Mars. Global maps of optical pulse width indicative of 100-m-scale surface roughness and 1.064-μm reflectivity with an accuracy of 5% have also been obtained.

/pdf/mars-orbiter-laser-altimeter-experiment-summary-after-the-3w1byzpn90.pdf

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter: Experiment summary after the first year of global mapping of Mars

The geological evolution of the Tibetan plateau is best viewed in a context broader than the India-Eurasia collision zone. After collision about 50 million years ago, crust was shortened in western and central Tibet, while large fragments of lithosphere moved from the collision zone toward areas of trench rollback in the western Pacific and Indonesia. Cessation of rapid Pacific trench migration (∼15 to 20 million years ago) coincided with a slowing of fragment extrusion beyond the plateau and probably contributed to the onset of rapid surface uplift and crustal thickening in eastern Tibet. The latter appear to result from rapid eastward flow of the deep crust, probably within crustal channels imaged seismically beneath eastern Tibet. These events mark a transition to the modern structural system that currently accommodates deformation within Tibet.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/321/5892/1054.full.pdf

The Geological Evolution of the Tibetan Plateau

[1] We present here a new InSAR persistent scatterer (PS) method for analyzing episodic crustal deformation in non-urban environments, with application to volcanic settings. Our method for identifying PS pixels in a series of interferograms is based primarily on phase characteristics and finds low-amplitude pixels with phase stability that are not identified by the existing amplitude-based algorithm. Our method also uses the spatial correlation of the phases rather than a well-defined phase history so that we can observe temporally-variable processes, e.g., volcanic deformation. The algorithm involves removing the residual topographic component of flattened interferogram phase for each PS, then unwrapping the PS phases both spatially and temporally. Our method finds scatterers with stable phase characteristics independent of amplitudes associated with man-made objects, and is applicable to areas where conventional InSAR fails due to complete decorrelation of the majority of scatterers, yet a few stable scatterers are present.

/pdf/a-new-method-for-measuring-deformation-on-volcanoes-and-3x99a7e12s.pdf

A new method for measuring deformation on volcanoes and other natural terrains using InSAR persistent scatterers

Granitic plutonism is the principal agent of crustal differentiation, but linking granite emplacement to crust formation requires knowledge of the magmatic evolution, which is notoriously difficult to reconstruct from bulk rock compositions. We unlocked the plutonic archive through hafnium (Hf) and oxygen (O) isotope analysis of zoned zircon crystals from the classic hornblende-bearing (I-type) granites of eastern Australia. This granite type forms by the reworking of sedimentary materials by mantle-like magmas instead of by remelting ancient metamorphosed igneous rocks as widely believed. I-type magmatism thus drives the coupled growth and differentiation of continental crust.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/315/5814/980.full.pdf

Magmatic and Crustal Differentiation History of Granitic Rocks from Hf-O Isotopes in Zircon

We present a general method for retrieving time-series of three component surface velocity field vector given a set of continuous synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisitions collected from multiple geometries. Our algorithm extends the single-line-of-sight mathematical framework developed for time-series analysis using interferometric SAR (InSAR) to three spatial dimensions. The inversion is driven by a design matrix corresponding to a dictionary of displacement functions parameterized in time. The resulting model minimizes a cost function using a non-regularized least-squares method. We applied our method to Rutford ice stream (RIS), West Antarctica, using a set of 101 multi-track multi-angle COSMO-SkyMed displacement maps generating azimuth and range pixel offsets.

/pdf/3d-velocity-field-time-series-using-synthetic-aperture-radar-ql05p1l2ls.pdf

3D velocity field time series using synthetic aperture radar: application to tidal-timescale ice-flow variability in Rutford Ice Stream, West Antarctica

Old and Young Coronae on Venus; Combining Regional and Global Studies to Constrain Thermal Evolution Models

Simple Elastic Dislocation Models for Interpreting Interseismic Deformation in Subduction Zones

Slip Distribution of the 2005 Mw 7.8 Tarapaca, Chile Earthquake

Until the Mw 6.8 Elazig earthquake ruptured the central portion of the East Anatolian Fault (EAF) on January 24, 2020, the region had only experienced moderate magnitude (Mw 6.2) earthquakes over t...

Mark Simons

Papers

3D velocity field time series using synthetic aperture radar: application to tidal-timescale ice-flow variability in Rutford Ice Stream, West Antarctica

Old and Young Coronae on Venus; Combining Regional and Global Studies to Constrain Thermal Evolution Models

Simple Elastic Dislocation Models for Interpreting Interseismic Deformation in Subduction Zones

Slip Distribution of the 2005 Mw 7.8 Tarapaca, Chile Earthquake

A stochastic view of the 2020 Elazığ Mw 6.8 earthquake