Principal Investigators: Paul W. Jewell, Associate Professor of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah; Kathleen Nicoll, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah; Charles G. Oviatt, Professor of Geology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas
Earth scientists at the University of Utah and Kansas State University will undertake fundamental research regarding Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, which was the largest lake in the western United States during the last glacial period, and the precursor to the modern Great Salt Lake. While the Lake Bonneville record for the past 18,000 years is reasonably well documented, the earlier period (18,000-30,000 years ago) is poorly understood because those deposits have been destroyed or overprinted by younger, rising lake waters, or subsequent erosion. This NSF-funded project will apply a variety of analytical tools including ground penetrating radar, 3-dimensional digital photography, hydrodynamic modeling, and radiocarbon dating of extremely small amounts of organic material to inform our understanding of landscape dynamics that have long puzzled researchers in this poorly documented period of the Lake Bonneville record.
Lake Bonneville and its associated sediments are culturally and economically important landforms of the Intermountain Western United States. Sands and gravels deposited by the lake form important groundwater aquifers, and provide aggregate resources to much of the region. The time period of Lake Bonneville being studied is a critical period in Earth's climate history as it marked the transition from a very cold, dry global climate during glacial times to the warmer, interglacial climate of the modern era. The records of landscape change at Lake Bonneville are vital for studying this climatic transition in the Great Basin province, and will provide details about rates of long-term hydrologic change within North America?s largest desert.
