Location of the River Euphrates in the Late Miocene; dating of terrace gravel at Shireen, Syria

We report gravel of the River Euphrates, capped by basalt that is Ar-Ar dated to ~9 Ma, at Shireen in northern Syria. This gravel, preserved by the erosion-resistant basalt, allows us for the first time to reconstruct the history of this major river during the Late Miocene. In response to progressive regional surface uplift, the Euphrates extended SE by ~800 km between the early Middle Miocene, when the coast was near Kahramanmara in southern Turkey, and the Pliocene, when it lay in western Iraq, east of the Arabian Platform uplands.