Full Title: An 800,000-Year Paleoclimatic Record from Core OL-92, Owens Lake, Southeast California
Editors: George I. Smith and James L. Bischoff
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.
Published: 3/20/1997
ISBN Number: 0813723175
Pages: 165
Product Category: EBooks