9510083 Roberts The middle Pliocene to early Pleistocene was a period of major global climate change. Few long and continuous of records of non-marine climate changes have been reported from this period in the continental United States, and those that exist are from the far west of the Great Basin where marine climate processes would be expected to significantly affect the records. New data have been obtained by the Principal Investigators from two recently drilled lacustrine sediment cores in the eastern Great Basin. Preliminary data suggest that these cores represent important geological records of paleoclimate (from 0.75 Ma to about 3.1 Ma) which will provide much-needed data to determine the relationship, and degree of coupling, between marine and continental climate processes. The goals of this study are to acquire environmental magnetic, lithostratigraphic, and sedimentologic data from these two cores in order to decipher the history of paleoclimate variations in this part of the Great Basin. Detailed documentation of the timing, temporal variation, and magnitude of Pliocene and Pleistocene climatic events will provide fundamentally important data concerning continental climate change. It is proposed to compare the data with other, less detailed, records from the Great Basin as well as marine paleoclimate records. This will help to constrain models of land-ocean interaction and models of global environmental change. The project is multidisciplinary and multi-institutional and will be carried out in close collaboration with colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Utah.
