Volcanism has continued throughout the Cenozoic on land and at the major oceanic ridges, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise, where new seafloor is continuously generated and carried away laterally by seafloor spreading. Iceland, which was formed in the middle Miocene, is one of the few places where the processes that occur at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge can be observed today.

Two of the most extensive volcanic outpourings recorded in the geologic record occurred during the Tertiary. Near the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, some 66 million years ago, massive outpourings of basaltic lava formed the Deccan Traps of India. About 55 million years ago, near the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, massive explosive volcanism took place in northwestern Scotland, northern Ireland, the Faeroe Islands, East Greenland, and along the rifted continental margins on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. Volcanic activity in the North Atlantic was associated with the rifting and separation of Eurasia from North America, which occurred on a line between Scandinavia and Greenland and left a stratigraphic record in the marine sedimentary basin of England and in ash deposits as far south as the Bay of Biscay. In both the Deccan and North Atlantic, comparable volumes of extensive basalts in the amount of 10,000,000 cubic km (about 2,400,000 cubic miles) were erupted.

The well-known volcanics of the Massif Central of south-central France, which figured so prominently in early (18th-century) investigations into the nature of igneous rocks, are of Oligocene age, as are those located in central Germany. The East African Rift System preserves a record of mid-to-late Tertiary rifting and the separation event that eventually led to the formation of a marine seaway linking the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean.

The circum-Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an active tectonic belt that extends from the Philippines through Japan and around the west coast of North and South America, was subject to seismic activity and andesitic volcanism throughout much of the Tertiary. The extensive Columbia Plateau basalts were extruded over Washington and Oregon during the Miocene, and many of the volcanoes of Alaska, Oregon, southern Idaho, and northeastern California date to the Late Tertiary. Active volcanism occurred in the newly uplifted Rocky Mountains during the early part of the Tertiary, whereas in the southern Rocky Mountains and Mexico volcanic activity was more common in the mid- and late Tertiary. The linear volcanic trends, such as the Hawaiian, Emperor, and Line island chains in the central and northwestern Pacific, are trails resulting from the movement of the Pacific Plate over volcanic “hot spots” (that is, magma-generating centres) that are probably fixed deep in Earth’s mantle. The major hot spot island groups such as the Hawaiian (which has been active over the past 30 million years), Galapagos, and Society (which were active during the Miocene) islands are volcanoes that rose from the seafloor. Central America, the Caribbean region, and northern South America were the sites of active volcanism throughout the Cenozoic.

In contrast to the passive-margin sedimentation on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains, the Cordilleran (or Laramide) orogeny in the Late Cretaceous, Paleocene, and Eocene produced a series of upfolded and upthrusted mountains and deep intermontane basins in the area of the Rocky Mountains. Deeply downwarped basins accumulated as much as 2,400 metres (about 8,000 feet) of Paleocene and Eocene sediment in the Green River Basin of southwestern Wyoming and 4,300 metres (about 14,000 feet) of sediment in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah. Other basins ranging from Montana to New Mexico accumulated similar but thinner packages of nonmarine fluvial and lacustrine sediments rich in fossil mammals and fish. In the Oligocene and Miocene the influences of the cordilleras, or mountain chains, on what is now the western United States had ceased, and the basins were gradually filled to the top by sediments and abundant volcanic ash deposits from eruptions in present-day Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. These basins were exhumed during the old Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary (about 1.8 million years ago) with renewed uplift of the long-buried Rocky Mountains, along with uplift of the Colorado Plateau, producing steep stream gradients that resulted in the cutting of the Grand Canyon to a depth of more than 1,800 metres (about 6,000 feet).

Volcanism along the Cascade mountain chain has been active since the late Eocene, as evidenced by the major eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 and subsequent minor eruptions. This volcanism was gradually shut off in California as the movement of plate boundaries changed from one of subduction to a sliding and transform motion (see plate tectonics: Principles of plate tectonics). With the development of the San Andreas Fault system, the western half of California started sliding northward. The Cascade–Sierra Nevada mountain chain began to swing clockwise, causing the extension of the Basin and Range Province in Nevada, Arizona, and western Utah. This crustal extension broke the Basin and Range into a series of north-south-trending fault-block mountains and downdropped basins, which filled with thousands of metres of upper Cenozoic sediment. These fault zones (particularly the Wasatch Fault in central Utah and the San Andreas zone in California) remain active today and are the source of most of the damaging earthquakes in North America. The Andean mountains were uplifted during the Neogene as a result of subduction of the South Pacific beneath the South American continent.

Complex tectonic activity also occurred in Asia and Europe during the Tertiary. The main Alpine orogeny began during the late Eocene and Oligocene and continued throughout much of the Neogene. Major tectonic activity in the eastern North Atlantic (Bay of Biscay) extended into southern France and culminated in the uplift of the Pyrenees in the late Eocene. On the south side of the Tethys, the coastal Atlas Mountains of North Africa experienced major uplift during this time, but the Betic region of southern Spain and the Atlas region of northern Morocco continued to display mirror-image histories of tectonic activity well into the late Neogene. In the Middle East the suturing of Africa and Asia occurred about 18 million years ago. Elsewhere, India had collided with the Asian continent about 40 million years ago, initiating the Himalayan uplift that was to intensify in the Pliocene and Pleistocene and culminate in the uplift of the great Plateau of Tibet and the Himalayan mountain range. Major orogenic movement also occurred in the Indonesian-Malaysian-Japanese arc system during the Neogene. In New Zealand, which sits astride the Indian-Australian and Pacific plate boundary, the major tectonic uplift (the Kaikoura orogeny) of the Southern Alps began about 24 million years ago.

Sedimentary sequences

Northwestern Europe contains a number of Tertiary marine basins that essentially rim the North Sea basin, itself the site of active subsidence during the Paleogene and infilling during the Neogene. The marine Hampshire and London basins, the Paris Basin, the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the North German Basin have become the standard for comparative studies of the Paleogene part of the Cenozoic, whereas the Mediterranean region (Italy) has become the standard for the Neogene. The Tertiary record of the Paris Basin is essentially restricted to the Paleogene strata (namely, those of Paleocene–late Oligocene age), whereas scattered Pliocene-Pleistocene deposits occur in England and Belgium above the Paleogene. The strata are relatively thin, nearly horizontal, and often highly fossiliferous, particularly in the middle Eocene calcaire grossier (freshwater limestone) of the Paris Basin, from which a molluscan fauna of more than 500 species has been described. The Paris Basin is a roughly oval-shaped basin centred on Paris, whereas the Hampshire and London basins lie to the southwest and northeast of London, respectively. The London Basin and the Anglo-Belgian Basin were part of a single sedimentary basin across what is now the English Channel during the early part of the Paleogene.

The total Paleogene stratigraphic succession in these basins is less than 300 metres (about 980 feet), and it is made up of clays, marls, sands, carbonates, lignites, and gypsum. These layers reflect alternations of marine, brackish, lacustrine, and terrestrial environments of deposition. The alternating transgressions and regressions of the sea have left a complex sedimentary record punctuated by numerous unconformities (interruptions in the deposition of sedimentary rock) and associated temporal hiatuses, and the correlation of these various units and events has challenged stratigraphers since the early 19th century. The integration of biostratigraphy, paleomagnetic stratigraphy, and tephrochronology (respectively, using fossils, magnetic properties, and ash layers to establish the age and succession of rocks) has resulted in a refined correlation of rock layers in these separate basins.

In North America, by contrast, extensive Tertiary sediments occur on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and extend around the margin of the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatán Peninsula, a distance of more than 5,000 km (about 3,100 miles). Seaward these deposits can be traced from the Atlantic Coastal Plain to the continental margin and rise and in the Gulf Coastal Plain into the subsurface formations of this oil-bearing province of the Gulf of Mexico. During the Paleocene the Gulf Coast extended northward roughly 2,000 km (about 1,200 miles) in a feature called the Mississippi Embayment, which reached as far as southwestern North Dakota and Montana; there marine deposits known as the Cannonball Formation can be seen as outcrops of sandstone. Although eroded between northwestern South Dakota and southern Illinois, marine outcrops continue southward to the present coastline and continue in the subsurface of the Gulf of Mexico. Tertiary sediments with a thickness in excess of 6,000 metres (about 20,000 feet) are estimated to lie beneath the continental margin along the northern Gulf of Mexico. In the Tampico Embayment of eastern Mexico, thicknesses of more than 3,000 metres (about 10,000 feet) have been estimated for the Paleocene Velasco Formation alone, which developed under conditions of active subsidence and associated rapid deposition. Exposures in the Atlantic Coastal Plain and most of the Gulf Coastal Plain are of Paleogene age, but considerable thicknesses of Neogene sediment occur in offshore wells in front of the Mississippi delta, where thicknesses in excess of 10,000 metres (about 33,000 feet) have been recorded for the Neogene alone. Sediments are dominantly calcareous in the Florida region and become more marly and eventually sandy to the west, reflecting the input of terrigenous matter transported seasonally by the Mississippi River and its precursors. Because of general faunal and floral similarities, it is possible to make relatively precise stratigraphic correlations in the Paleogene between the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plain region and the basins in northwestern Europe.