Over the past two decades

as the programs of DSDP and ODP revealed increasingly a great quantity of information from the deep ocean

the Tertiary chronostratigraphy has been one of the frontiers that advances most rapidly in contemporary geosciences.The progress was initially stimulated by the availability of well-preserved and undisturbed deep-sea cores

and then continuously nourished by new information from the pro-jects.Based upon the improvements of plankton biostratigraphic datum events

radiochronology and correlations with magnetic polarity anomalies

the Tertiary stratigra-phy has been brought to the brink of a breakthrough that is approaching the limits of stratigraphic resolution.A synthesis on these progresses

as well as the global Tertiary stratotype stratigraphy

is presented in this paper.