Highest Pluvial-Lake Shorelines and Pleistocene Climate of the Western Great Basin

Reheis, Marith C.

doi:10.1006/qres.1999.2064

Cited by 70 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The presence of large lakes in the now-arid valleys of the Basin and Range during Pleistocene glacial periods points to a fundamentally different hydrologic balance, requiring either increased precipitation and/or decreased evaporation during the late Pleistocene glacial periods (Benson et al, 1990;Reheis, 1999a). Additionally, decreased temperature and increased relative humidity may have played a role in both increasing precipitation and/or decreasing evaporation.…”

Section: Late Pleistocene Pluvial Lakes In Western North Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, decreased temperature and increased relative humidity may have played a role in both increasing precipitation and/or decreasing evaporation. The net effect of the temperature changes is enhanced runoff within a given watershed, and diminished surface evaporation, leading to hydrologic conditions capable of creating and maintaining a lake system (Reheis, 1999a).…”

Section: Late Pleistocene Pluvial Lakes In Western North Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most are closed basins (also referred to as terminal or endorheic basins), such that the basin retains all precipitation and allows no outflows of water to adjacent basins. Many of these closed basins sustained pluvial lakes during glacial periods of the Pleistocene but have since diminished in size or developed playa lakes during the Holocene (Figure 1) (Reheis, 1999a;Orme, 2008). Playas contain shallow lakes seasonally (during winter months) or during prolonged wet spells such as El Nino years (Orme, 2008).…”

Section: Geologic and Climatic Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The nature of paleoclimatic records make it fundamentally difficult to separate the effects of decreased temperatures versus increased precipitation using lake shoreline records (Reheis, 1999a). Modeling of the Estancia Basin lake system hydrology (highstands and stillstands listed in Table 6) concluded that rainfall might have doubled relative to modern values to produce large pluvial lakes (Menking et al, 2004).…”

Section: Recordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lake levels are primarily controlled by runoff within a lake's watershed and surface evaporation (Reheis, 1999a). While lakes are likely recording summer conditions (that of decreased temperature), speleothems, groundwater systems and soils appear to reflect winter temperature conditions.…”

Section: Recordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

An Assessment of Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene Lake Level Fluctuations in Surprise Valley, California

Ibarra¹

2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Knowledge of Earth’s climate history and sensitivity, combined with modeling past and future climate, are central to informing policy decisions regarding future climate change. The hydrologic response to future warming scenarios due to increased anthropogenic CO2 emissions remains uncertain. Freshwater availability in the arid western United States is projected to decrease in availability as increased agricultural, urban and industrial uses continue to stress supplies. Motivated by the potential for dramatic future hydrologic changes, studies recording the abrupt transitions between different equilibrium states of natural past climate variability shed light on our understanding of the modern climate system.The presence of pluvial lakes in the Basin and Range Province, in the western United States, during the late Pleistocene (40 to 10 ka) indicates far greater moisture availability during the Pleistocene glacials. This study investigates the timing and magnitude of the most recent pluvial lake cycle that filled Surprise Valley, California using geophysical, geochemical and geochronologic tools. Spanning 31.2 to 4.6 ka, this new lake level record places the highest lake level, at 180 meters above present day playa, at 13.9 ± 1.2 ka. This age appears to be nearly synchronous with highstands of Lake Lahontan to the south and the Chewaucan Basin to the north. Additionally, most of the Basin and Range lake highstands, including Lake Surprise, follow peaks in precipitation minus evapotranspiration (P-ET) by 8-10 kyr. By compiling a diverse set of paleoclimate data available for western North America, I found that the timing and geographic distribution of lake highstands is inconsistent with increased precipitation in response to shifting westerly winds, the current model for the genesis of large lakes in western North America. Rather, lakes levels are more strongly correlated with changes in summer insolation, suggesting that lake highstands were likely facilitated by colder temperatures and increased humidity due to the presence of continental ice sheets and increased atmospheric convergence. I compared the constraints from lake and soil-based records to Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model simulations from the Paleoclimate Model Intercomparison Project 2. Based on model-proxy intercomparison, the Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models, the same models used to also assess future climatic changes, poorly predict hydrologic quantities for the Last Glacial Maximum.

show abstract

Section: Late Pleistocene Pluvial Lakes In Western North Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Late Pleistocene Pluvial Lakes In Western North Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Geologic and Climatic Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Recordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Recordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

An Assessment of Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene Lake Level Fluctuations in Surprise Valley, California

Ibarra¹

2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Average infiltration at Yucca Mountain over the next million years

Stothoff

Walter

2013

Water Resources Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

[1] An uncertainty distribution is developed to describe areal-average infiltration at Yucca Mountain averaged over the next million years. The distribution uses Infiltration Tabulator for Yucca Mountain (ITYM) model results to estimate uncertainty in net infiltration given decadal-average climate, driven with two independent estimates for potential future climatic sequences. Both future climatic sequences use orbital mechanics linked to paleoclimatic proxies to estimate future climate states, but one uses primarily biotic indicators and the other uses primarily abiotic indicators to link paleoclimate to orbital stage. Abiotic indicators suggest that present-day climate variation by latitude in the Great Basin is reasonably analogous to glacial-scale climate variation at a single location once orographic, lake effect, and insolation influences are accounted for. In the southern Sierra Nevada, abiotic indicators suggest that mean annual precipitation was 1.7-1.9 times larger than present and mean annual temperature was 5.6-7C cooler than present at the last glacial maximum. The influence of decadal to millennial-scale variability is estimated using the 8000 year Methuselah Walk tree-ring record, which suggests that even large inferred fluctuations over the Holocene only modestly increase 8000-year-average infiltration. Combining the future-climate projections with the infiltration model uncertainty distribution yields approximately lognormal uncertainty distributions for projected million-year arealaverage net infiltration, with a mean of 41 mm/yr and coefficient of variation of 0.81. Even if anthropogenic effects significantly alter climatic patterns relative to past climate cycles, the projected anthropogenic period is sufficiently brief that million-year averages are not likely to be substantially influenced.Citation: Stothoff, S. A., and G. R. Walter (2013), Average infiltration at Yucca Mountain over the next million years, Water Resour.

show abstract

Planform‐asymmetry and backwater effects on river‐cutoff kinematics and clustering

Ielpi

Lapôtre

Finotello

et al. 2020

Earth Surf Processes Landf

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

River bends occasionally meander to the point of cutoff, whereby a river shortcuts itself and isolates a portion of its course. This fundamental process fingerprints a river's long‐term planform geometry, its stratigraphic record, and biogeochemical fluxes in the floodplain. Although meander cutoffs are common in fast‐migrating channels, timelapse imagery of the Earth surface typically does not offer a long enough baseline for statistically robust analyses of these processes. We seek to bridge this gap by quantifying cutoff kinematics along the Humboldt River (Nevada) – a stream that, from 1994 to 2019, hosted an exceptionally high number of cutoffs (specifically, 174 of the chute type and 53 of the neck type). A coincidence between major floods and cutoff incidence is first suggestive of hydrographic modulation. Moreover, not just higher sinuosity but also upstream planform skewness is associated with higher cutoff incidence and channel widening for a sub‐population of chute cutoffs. We propose a conceptual model to explain our results in terms of channel‐flow structure and then examine the distances between adjacent cutoffs to understand the mechanisms governing their clustering. We find that both local and nonlocal perturbations together trigger the clustering of new cutoffs, over distances capped by the backwater length and over yearly to decadal timescales. Our research suggests that planform geometry and backwater controls might sway the occurrence of cutoff clusters – both local and nonlocal – thereby offering new testable hypotheses to explore the evolution of meandering‐river landscapes that have significant implications for river engineering and stratigraphic modelling. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

show abstract

Highest Pluvial-Lake Shorelines and Pleistocene Climate of the Western Great Basin

Cited by 70 publications

References 34 publications

An Assessment of Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene Lake Level Fluctuations in Surprise Valley, California

An Assessment of Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene Lake Level Fluctuations in Surprise Valley, California

Average infiltration at Yucca Mountain over the next million years

Planform‐asymmetry and backwater effects on river‐cutoff kinematics and clustering

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About