Reconstructing Central Asian climate during the Cenozoic
We have been working on the coupled climate and tectonic evolution of central Asia for the past two decades. Such research will help us understand how global climate change, tectonics, and shifting seaways have altered climate on our planet’s largest continent over the past 60 million years. Our current work is focused on southern Tibet using triple oxygen of hydrothermally altered rocks (Ibarra et al., in review). Previous to this research, we have concentrated out efforts in the basins north of Tibet in China (Graham et al., 2005, American Journal of Science; Kent-Corson et al., 2009, Earth and Planetary Sciences). Following that, we worked in Mongolia and Kazakhstan to produce some of the first Cenozoic stable isotope records from northern Central Asia. As part of an interdisciplinary, multi-university team, we studied the rise of the Hangay Mountains in central Mongolia and the Altai Mountains at the intersection of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Specifically, we examined the role of the mid-latitude westerlies and their interactions with these ranges to understand the drivers of long-term climate change in Central Asia. Recent work has been published in the American Journal of Science (Caves et al., 2014), Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Caves et al., 2015), Geology (Caves et al., 2016), and in GSA Today (Caves et al., 2017).
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