Boulder, CO, USA The Geological Society of America presents a new Special Paper, Paleoenvironments of Bear Lake, Utah and Idaho, and Its Catchment. This volume is the culmination of more than a decade of coordinated investigations aimed at a holistic understanding of the long-lived Bear Lake, which is located 100 km northeast of Salt Lake City, along the course of the Bear River, the largest river in the Great Basin of the western United States.
One of the oldest existing lakes in North America, Bear Lake lies within an asymmetric, tectonically active basin that contains hundreds of meters of sediment accumulated over the past several million years. This volume's 14 chapters, with 20 contributing authors, contain geological, mineralogical, geochemical, paleontological, and limnological studies extending from the drainage basin to the depocenter. The studies span both modern and paleoenvironments, including a 120-m-long sediment core that captures a continuous record of the last two glacial-interglacial cycles.
According to editors Joseph Rosenbaum of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver and Darrell S. Kaufman of Northern Arizona University, understanding Bear Lake and the paleorecords revealed there yields information about past climate for the larger region, including the Upper Colorado River Basin, the source of much of the water for the southwestern United States.
|Contact: Christa Stratton|
Geological Society of America