Vegetation climate and marine environmental reconstruction in the western Mediterranean (southern Rifian corridor, Morocco) over the Tortonian-Messinian transition.

The Southern Rifian Corridor was a gateway connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in the Late Miocene. Its rapid narrowing at the Tortonian - Messinian transition around 7.2 Ma, resulting from very intense tectonic activity, has triggered an ecological crisis well before the deposition of the Messinian Salinity crisis evaporites.

Data on lithofacies, sedimentology and palaeontology of South Rifian Corridor sections (Morocco).

We provide lithological, sedimentological and micropalaeontological descriptions of 39 sections and boreholes crossing the upper Miocene deposits of the Rifian Corridor. These deposits represent the sedimentary remnants of the marine gateway that connected the Atlantic to the Mediterranean in the late Miocene. Results from these 39 sites were adopted to reconstruct the palaeogeographic evolution of the gateway presented in the associated research article (Capella et al.