Be-inferred paleo-denudation rates imply that the mid-Miocene western central Andes eroded as slowly as today.

Terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide concentrations of detrital minerals yield catchment-wide rates at which hillslopes erode. These estimates are commonly used to infer millennial scale denudation patterns and to identify the main controls on mass-balance and landscape evolution at orogenic scale. The same approach can be applied to minerals preserved in stratigraphic records of rivers, although extracting reliable paleo-denudation rates from Ma-old archives can be limited by the target nuclide's half-life and by exposure to cosmic radiations after deposition.