Eduardo Garzanti

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Precisely reconstructing the diachroneity of continental collision along various Paleo‐, Meso‐, and Neo‐Tethyan branches has proved to be challenging, which limited our understanding of the dynamics of terrane suturing and associated topographic inheritance in the Tibetan Plateau. In this study, we present stratigraphic and sedimentological evidenc...

We present an integrated, high-resolution, biostratigraphical, mineralogical, and geochemical characterization of the well-exposed Upper Paleocene - Lower Eocene stratigraphic succession of the Surghar Range (Baroch Nala section, NE Pakistan). The faunal assemblages from the Baroch Nala section, dominated by hyaline benthic foraminifera and green c...

Oceanic anoxic events (OAE) are global carbon-cycle perturbations and major paleoenvironmental changes documented by deposition of black shales rich in organic matter. Jurassic black shales exposed in the Biluo Co Section of the Qiangtang Basin (central Tibet) display a ~3% negative carbon isotope excursion (CIE) previously regarded as documenting...

This special issue of Mesozoic is dedicated to the memory of a great specialist in carbonate sedimentology, Dr Juan Li, who passed away on July 19th, 2023. Juan Li sadly left us while logging the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) interval in the Tibetan Himalaya. This special issue has collected contributions to Mesozoic–Cenozoic geological s...

The Kalahari Basin in southern Africa, shaped by subsidence and epeirogeny, features the Okavango Rift Zone (ORZ) as a significant structural element characterized by diffused extensional deformation forming a prominent depocenter. This study elucidates the Pleistocene landscape evolution of the ORZ by examining the chronology of sediment formation...

Studying the origin of rivers, the development of drainage through geological time, and the multiple processes that affect the composition of the sediment is a fascinating scientific adventure. This article probes into modern sedimentary processes in the Orange River catchment, which covers much of South Africa, and monitors changes in petrographic...

This study explores in detail the complexity of textural–compositional relationships in fluvial sediments. To this aim, fifteen size fractions (from clay to granule) of three sediment samples characterized by virtually identical size distribution from the Niger and Benue rivers in central Nigeria were separately analyzed by multiple methods (optica...

在大陆碰撞型的周缘前陆盆地研究中，西方学者基于阿尔卑斯法国、意大利、瑞士的研究，基于浅水碳酸盐岩（Calcaires à Nummulites），半远洋泥灰岩（Marnes Bleues），深水浊积岩（Grès d'Annot），提出了周缘前陆盆地的 “欠充填三位一体 ”模型，在此基础上提出周缘前陆盆地“复理石-磨拉石“演化模型。随后，这些基于阿尔卑斯造山带的周缘前陆盆地模型被广泛接受，并应用于世界各地的大陆碰撞相关的周缘前陆盆地研究中。早期，我们在喜马拉雅周缘前陆盆地研究过程中，发现阿尔卑斯的这种前陆盆地模型很难运用到喜马拉雅周缘前陆盆地，存在种种问题。因此，抱着去阿尔卑斯学习的态度去法国东南部野外考察，但是还是越看越迷糊。后决定与意大利学者一起，带着我们的困惑和问题，对西阿尔卑斯山始新世...

Huge amounts of mineral dust are produced in northern Africa, representing the largest source of aerosols worldwide. Transatlantic dust transport is known to fertilize soils as far as in the Amazon Basin. Yet, the influence of Saharan dust on chemical weathering fluxes and associated nutrient release in West Africa remains largely overlooked. To ad...

The sedimentary record of the Paleocene−Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, ca. 56 Ma) allows the study of feedback mechanisms over the entire duration of a climatic event, from carbon release to the subsequent recovery phase. Clay sedimentation increase in the oceans during the PETM is linked to enhanced terrestrial erosion. Fluvial channel mobility has...

Detrital zircon U–Pb geochronology (DZG) is widely used in the provenance analysis and calculating maximum depositional ages (MDAs) of strata. To assess the geologic limitations of this approach, we conducted DZG coupled with bulk‐petrology and heavy‐mineral analyses of Miocene volcaniclastic and non‐volcanic siliciclastic sandstones from the SW Ta...

The provenance of the Upper Miocene sandstones from the Sava and Drava depressions of the North Croatian Basin was investigated using petrographic, geochemical, and heavy mineral analyses, including Raman spectroscopy. The study of these sandstones, which represent important oil and gas reservoirs in Croatia, allowed reconstruction of the Late Mioc...

Understanding the petrographic and geochemical characteristics of different tectonic settings is essential to improving traditional methods of identifying the provenance of palaeo-sedimentary environments. This research focuses on the K2b unit, which consists of mixed carbonate and volcanic lithic sandstones located in Iran with the age of the Turo...

The water resource provided by lake basins in the western desert of Iraq is important for human occupation of areas outside the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, both in the past and into the future. This paper presents the first geomorphological and geochro-nological study of the date of formation of the Najaf Sea and the only such study of any lake ba...

The Thar Desert is a major sediment depocenter located in southwestern Asia and bordering the Indus drainage system to its east. It is unclear where the sediment that built the desert is coming from, and when the desert experienced phases of construction. In particular, we seek to establish the role of the South Asian monsoon in the initial formati...

The main exploration targets for hydrocarbons in the Niger Delta Basin are within the Agbada sandstone reservoirs. The current study utilizes a multi-technical approach (SEM-MLA, SEM-EDS, XRD and LA-ICP-MS) to evaluate the roles of framework composition and diagenetic processes, particularly calcite cementation on reservoir quality in Miocene inter...

The Kalahari Basin in southern Africa, shaped by subsidence and epeirogeny, features the Okavango Rift Zone (ORZ) as a significant structural element characterized by diffused extensional deformation forming a prominent depocenter. This study elucidates the Pleistocene landscape evolution of the ORZ by examining the chronology of sediment formation...

Understanding Earth’s changing climate is a crucial challenge. However, the available time series of direct measurements are often insufficient to fully capture climatic process that unfolds over centuries and millennia. Combining History and Geology can fill this gap. Focusing on rainfall and flood events, this research proposes a multidisciplinar...

We investigate the Palaeocene succession of the Hazara Basin (Northern Pakistan) to better understand the impact of climate change on marine carbonate-producing organisms. These shallow-water carbonates, deposited during the Late Palaeocene, before the onset of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, were studied using a quantitative approach to hig...

The Niger River drains a large part of the West African Craton, where rocks ranging in age from Paleoarchean to recent offer an unexcelled opportunity to map the diverse time structures of sediment sources and provide essential information for provenance diagnoses. In this study, U‐Pb zircon dating is complemented with bulk‐sand geochemical (Zr, Hf...

The avulsion and overflow of river courses during floods, a result of channel siltation above the alluvial plain, is a cause of major natural disasters, including huge property damage and destruction of farmlands. The most sensitive to such risks is the very densely populated area of the Yellow River lower reaches, one of China's most important gra...

Plain Language Summary The convergence and collision of India and Asia leading to the formation of the Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau (“the roof of the world”) is one of the most significant geological events of the Cenozoic Era. Geophysical data show that rocks of the Indian continent lie beneath southern Tibet, but the early subduction h...

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) offers an excellent opportunity to study the ecological and environmental responses to global warming. Discussing the so far poorly constrained amplitude and mechanisms of sea-level changes during the PETM is the principal goal of the present study from the epicontinental Tarim seaway. A negative carbon i...

Age of metamorphsim in the Tethys Himalaya

Source-to-sink evolution of a basin is a key to understand sedimentary processes, especially in a complex regional orogenic setting. Detrital zircon populations can be traced from their primary sources to their depositional settings. The resulting interpretations are enhanced by calculation of the adjacent orogen's paleoaltimetry, which provides ad...

In the case of modern river sediments, source rocks, tectonic setting, and climatic and geomorphological conditions are fully known, diagenetic effects are by definition none, and physical and chemical processes during erosion, transport, and deposition can be investigated directly in any required detail. Their study thus provides the fundamental i...

The Namche Barwa Syntaxis (NBS) is one of the most productive detrital factories on Earth. Previous studies have shown that the NBS supplies large amounts of sediment to the Brahmaputra River, although the sources and controlling factors of sediment production have not been ascertained in detail. This study presents petrographic and heavy‐mineral d...

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a period of rapid and significant global warming that occurred around 56 million years ago. During this time, the sea-surface temperature increased by 5-8°C, leading to major changes in global climate, ocean chemistry, and marine ecosystems. One of the most significant impacts of PETM was the disrupti...

The timing of continental collision between Arabia and Eurasia is a highly controversial issue, on which new constraints are here provided from the Amiran Basin (Zagros Mountains, Iran). Upper Cretaceous carbonate ramps grown along the Arabian northern margin are overlain by the siliciclastic deep-water Amiran and shallow-water Kashkan Formations,...

Tropical rimmed platforms represent a much more efficient protection from coastal erosion than carbonate ramps. Understanding the controlling factors of platform geometry is therefore crucial to predict the fate of rimmed platforms under global-warming conditions. Here, we present detailed biostratigraphic, sedimentological, geochemical, and high-r...

The Himalayan-Tibetan mountains raised due to doubling of the continental crust during the India-Asia collision, which is often assumed to have occurred by underthrusting of the Indian crust directly below the Asian crust. However, this model scenario requires very weak continental lithospheres, resulting in a collision system that is difficult to...

River‐fed dune fields characterized by relatively low quartz content are much more common on Earth than generally assumed, and the aeolian dune field system in the Yarlung Tsangpo (Upper Brahmaputra) river catchment is considered a typical example. As one of the highest‐altitude fluvial‐aeolian systems on Earth, the dune fields in different wide tr...

The relative roles of tectonics and climate change in global and regional desertification are not well constrained. Previous studies have emphasized the role played by climate change as a dominant cause of southeastern (SE) Asia desertification during the mid-Late Cretaceous. The effect of early uplift of the Tibetan Plateau prior to the collision...

High-resolution petrographic and heavy-mineral analyses of Bengal Fan turbidites from six cores drilled during IODP Expeditions 353 and 354 elucidate factors controlling their intersample compositional variability as a key to understanding sedimentary processes and erosional evolution of the Himalayan belt since the Miocene. Bengal Fan turbidites a...

In this study, we propose a new approach based on Raman hyperspectral imaging and chemometrics for the analysis of chemically heterogeneous surfaces of weathered minerals. A pyrite sample showing a heterogeneous surface with different alteration products, is used to test the validity of the technique. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was initiall...

Metamorphic rocks and surrounding Paleozoic strata in central Tibet compose the core of an anticlinorium associated with the Central Qiangtang Mountain Range. The analysis of Mesozoic strata flanking the anticlinorium provides insights into the geological and landscape evolution of the range, which is important in determining the Mesozoic evolution...

The major facies changes documented in shallow-marine sediments of the northern Indian passive margin of Neo-Tethys throughout the Jurassic, from widespread platform carbonates in the Early Jurassic to organic-rich black shales in the Late Jurassic, imply a substantial turnover in oceanic conditions. All along the Tethys (Tibetan) Himalaya, from th...

This study illustrates the clay mineralogy and sedimentary geochemistry of the Red River and its major tributaries and distributaries in northern Vietnam and shows how these methods can be used to unravel grain size, provenance, hydraulic-sorting, and chemical weathering effects. All sand samples are SiO2-rich and consequently depleted in most chem...

The detrital zircon has been most widely used in sediment provenance studies and basin analysis over the past 20 years. With the accumulation of a bounty of detrital zircon ages, however, the traditional method of data treatment and visualization easily ignores the internal differences of potential source regions. In this study, 49,111 U-Pb ages (5...

Epidote group minerals are one of the three most abundant kinds of heavy minerals in orogenic sediments, the other two being amphibole and garnet. They resist diagenesis better than amphibole and resist weathering in soils better than garnet. Their chemical composition and optical properties vary markedly and systematically with temperature and pre...

We here present the first comprehensive provenance study of the Zambezi deep-sea fan, based on integrated petrographic, heavy-mineral, elemental-geochemistry, isotope-geochemistry, and detrital-zircon-geochronology analyses of middle Pleistocene to Holocene turbidites. The Zambezi Valley and Fan represent the submarine part of an ∼ 5000-km-long sed...

Nature is never at steady state. Natural history is generated by ever-changing and ever-interacting forces that produce continuous changes. The geological record at virtually all timescales shows that these changes do not cancel each other and, thus, that the steady state is utopic. However, we need a state of equilibrium as a starting point for mo...

The present work describes the diagnostic petrographic and mineralogical signatures of fluvial detritus derived from the Shaotanghe River (right bank tributary of the Minjiang River). The river length is 71 km2 and its drainage area is 1730 km². Six bed-load sediment samples were collected from different tributaries of the Shaotanghe based on the l...

To understand the early topographic growth of the Tibetan Plateau and the causes and effects of climate change in this region, it is important to reconstruct the drainage evolution across Southeast Tibet. Based on age constraints provided by detrital zircons in the fluvial sandstones in the Khorat Plateau Basin, we identified a major Early Cretaceo...

The West Burma Terrane (WBT) is a small terrane bounded to the east by the Asian Sibumasu Block and to the west by the Indo‐Burman Ranges (IBR), the latter being an exhumed accretionary prism that formed during subduction of Indian oceanic lithosphere beneath Asia. Understanding the geological history of the WBT is important for reconstruction of t...

Early Paleogene hyperthermal episodes including the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) have long been viewed as analogues of the Anthropocene global warming. Few studies, however, have analyzed the environmental consequences of such climatic anomalies in deep-water turbidite-rich successions. This integrated sedimentological, biostratigraphic,...

The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, ~56 Ma) is a large negative carbon isotope excursion (CIE) that testifies to a massive perturbation of the global carbon cycle and has been considered to be an ancient, deep-time analogue for present and future climate change. However, the environmental and carbon isotopic response to the PETM in shallow-...

Clay mineralogy and geochemistry of river muds around Taiwan Island reveal dominant provenance control. Abundant illite with subordinate chlorite in the western, northern, and southern parts of the island are derived from Cenozoic mudrocks of the axial Slate Belt and Western Foothills. In eastern Taiwan, chlorite is most common in muds generated fr...

特提斯域一个重要的特征就是由于大大小小的地体的分分合合，导致延续时间长短不一的大洋的出现与消失。如何识别这些曾经出现的大洋是摆在地球科学研究者面前的重大而极富挑战的问题。本文以班公湖-怒江洋（班怒洋）为研究对象，总结和评述现有的地层、沉积、岩石、地质年代、地球化学、大地构造、古地磁等方面的数据和证据，试图勾勒出青藏高原中部这个曾经存在的大洋的演化，包括恢复其诞生、生长和消亡的历史。在此基础上，对班公湖-怒江缝合带（班怒带）争论的热点问题进行评述与讨论，这些问题涉及板块构造理论研究中的前沿问题，包括初始大洋的识别、海山与微陆块的性质、俯冲起始与俯冲极性的判别、初始碰撞时间的约束等。研究表明，羌塘与拉萨之间的大陆裂解发生在早-中二叠世，晚二叠世班公湖-怒江洋已经诞生；三叠纪南羌塘地体快速向北漂移...

The vast eastern-Tethyan oceanic domain that throughout the Mesozoic extended between Gondwana and Eurasia was a puzzle of larger and smaller microcontinents separated by larger and smaller oceans, the paleogeographic reconstruction of which poses major challenging problems. This review article summarizes the available stratigraphic, sedimentologic...

We here review in terms of tectono-magmatic setting and Quaternary landscape dynamics what is known about the provenance of Argentine dune fields and their fluvial feeder systems draining the Andean Cordillera. The detrital signatures of these eolian sediments were previously investigated based on either framework petrography and heavy minerals or...

New investigations of petrographic and geochemical characteristics of Mesozoic sandstones from the northwestern Gulf of Suez in Egypt have been undertaken, documenting dominance of quartzose sandstones containing on average ~ 5% of mostly sedimentary and subordinately metamorphic lithic fragments (siltstone, sandy siltstone, and, more rarely slate,...

The deposits of large Asian rivers with unique drainage geometries have attracted considerable attention due to their explanatory power concerning tectonism, surface uplift and upstream drainage evolution. This study presents the first petrographic, heavy mineral, Nd and Sr isotope geochemistry, and detrital zircon geochronology results from the Ho...