The Xingu River is a large clearwater river in eastern Amazonia and its downstream sector, known as the Volta Grande do Xingu ("Xingu Great Bend"), is a unique fluvial landscape that plays an important role in the biodiversity, biogeochemistry and prehistoric and historic peopling of Amazonia. The sedimentary dynamics of the Xingu River in the Volta Grande and its downstream sector will be shifted in the next few years due to the construction of dams associated with the Belo Monte hydropower project. Impacts on river biodiversity and carbon cycling are anticipated, especially due to likely changes in sedimentation and riverbed characteristics. This research project aims to define the geological and climate factors responsible for the development of the Volta Grande landscape and to track its environmental changes during the Holocene, using the modern system as a reference. In this context, sediment cores, riverbed rock and sediment samples and greenhouse gas (GHG) samples were collected in the Volta Grande do Xingu and adjacent upstream and downstream sectors. The reconstruction of past conditions in the Volta Grande is necessary for forecasting future scenarios and defining biodiversity conservation strategies under the operation of Belo Monte dams. This paper describes the scientific questions of the project and the sampling surveys performed by an international team of Earth scientists and biologists during the dry seasons of 2013 and 2014. Preliminary results are presented and a future workshop is planned to integrate results, present data to the scientific community and discuss possibilities for deeper drilling in the Xingu ria to extend the sedimentary record of the Volta Grande do Xingu.

The Central Pontides of N Turkey represents a mobile orogenic belt of the southern Eurasian margin that experienced several phases of exhumation associated with the consumption of different branches of the Neo‐Tethys Ocean and the amalgamation of continental domains. Our new low‐temperature thermochronology data help to constrain the timing of these episodes, providing new insights into associated geodynamic processes. In particular, our data suggest that exhumation occurred at (1) ~110 to 90 Ma, most likely during tectonic accretion and exhumation of metamorphic rocks from the subduction zone; (2) from ~60 to 40 Ma, during the collision of the Kirşehir and Anatolide‐Tauride microcontinental domains with the Eurasian margin; (3) from ~40 to 25 Ma, either during the early stages of the Arabia‐Eurasia collision (soft collision) when the Arabian passive margin reached the trench, implying 70 to 530 km of subduction of the Arabian passive margin, or during a phase of trench advance predating hard collision at ~20 Ma; and (4) ~11 Ma to the present, during transpression associated with the westward motion of Anatolia. Our findings document the punctuated nature of fault‐related exhumation, with episodes of fast cooling followed by periods of slow cooling or subsidence, the role of inverted normal faults in controlling the Paleogene exhumation pattern, and of the North Anatolian Fault in dictating the most recent pattern of exhumation.

The tropical Northern Andes constitutes a great area to explore the interaction of tectonics and climate on the evolution of orogenic topography, as they are tectonically active, have steep gradients in relief and precipitation, and were less affected by Quaternary glaciations than high‐latitude mountains. This study combines new and published thermochronology along ∼500 km of the Eastern Cordillera in Colombia to explore what controls the rates of Miocene and Pliocene exhumation, including: (1) variations in late Cenozoic paleoclimate, (2) orographic precipitation or (3) variation in rock uplift associated with structural heterogeneities along the eastern flank of the range. New thermochronology data consists of 27 apatite and seven zircon (U‐Th)/He ages and five apatite fission track ages. Thermal history models show that rock cooling as a result of erosional exhumation has occurred everywhere in the Eastern Cordillera since at least the Miocene at spatially and temporally variable rates. Exhumation rates vary by an order of magnitude between various fault‐bounded blocks and there is no evidence for a spatially uniform increase in exhumation rates during the past ∼4–5 Ma that would indicate uniform climatic driven exhumation. The west (dry) to east (wet) gradient in precipitation rates across the Garzon Massif is not a major factor controlling the exhumation rates, as the exhumation rates are highest on the western drier flank. The greatest rates of exhumation of the Eastern Cordillera occur in the blocks associated with vigorous Cenozoic reactivation of inherited faults that had focused extension during Early Cretaceous rifting.