Regions of coastal upwelling are highly productive and therefore exert a strong influence on marine ecosystems~1, regional climate~2 and, more widely, the global carbon cycle~3. In the modern ocean, coastal upwelling occurs off the coast of regions including California, Peru, Mauritania and Namibia. Modern coastal upwelling systems generally initiated and intensified over the past 20 million years. However, the reasons for their strengthening throughout the Miocene and Pliocene remain controversial and in some cases, enigmatic. Of the world's major coastal upwelling zones, the Benguela upwelling system supports the greatest biological productivity. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Jung and colleagues~4 infer that the intensification of the Benguela upwelling over the past 12 million years was closely tied to the history of continental elevation in Africa.
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