Full Title: An 800,000-Year Paleoclimatic Record from Core OL-92, Owens Lake, Southeast California

Editors: George I. Smith and James L. Bischoff

Buy the e-book(not available in print)

A need for more lacustrine records that document late Quaternary climates in now-arid western North America led to a U.S. Geological Survey-funded core-drilling project on Owens Lake, southeast California. The resulting 323-m-long core records lake fluctuations since 800 ka. This volume describes how they are revealed by variations in the CO³ and organic-C percentages, pore-water isotopic content, composition of clay-sized materials, magnetic susceptibility, and fossils (diatoms, ostracodes, mollusks, fish, and pollen). Sediment ages are based on ¹⁴C data, measured mass-accumulation rates, and paleomagnetic variations. The recorded wet and dry climatic cycles are about 100 ka long. Although their distribution in time is similar to those of deep-sea and other records that largely reflect paleotemperatures, the maxima and minima of the wet and dry cycles differ in age from correlative inflections in paleotemperature records by an average of 15 ky.

[ Table of Contents ]

Published: 3/20/1997

ISBN Number: 0813723175

Pages: 165

Product Category: Special Papers