Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory

05 May, 07 PM - 09 May, 09 AM

During this visit, I plan to collect ~10 small rock samples from the glacial moraines surrounding Walker Lake, CA. While the dominant periodicity of the large northern hemisphere ice sheets is well established as waning and waxing over a 100,000 year cycle, it is possible that smaller glaciers in other regions have not necessarily followed the same pattern. For example, some research in High Mountain Asia has shown that the primary periodicity of glaciation in the region may be dominated by the 23 kyr periodicity cycle, and recently, Doughty et al. (2021) concluded that the 41 kyr obliquity cycle may still be an important control on the timing of glacial advance in many parts of the globe. In order to test hypotheses related to the periodicity of glacial cycles on a global level (i.e. not just northern hemisphere ice sheets) we need to date moraines deposited by smaller individual glaciers beyond the last glacial cycle. For questions around terrestrial glacier and climate changes, we often rely on marine sediments, and while these can provide excellent continuous records, they do not directly tell us what happened on land, and to individual glaciers. The glacial moraines surrounding Walker Lake, California represent a promising target for testing these questions. Using very early dating methods, Phillips et al. (1990) showed that the glacier that covered the Sierra Nevadas during the last ice age may have been largest about 65,000 years ago, an unexpected finding at the time. Recent work in New Zealand, Patagonia, and Alaska has shown definitively that glaciers in these areas were largest at this time, unlike the large ice sheets of the northern hemisphere. Now that dating methods have improved, we must revisit the age of the Walker Lake moraines to understand the spatial extent of this climate event 65,000 years ago.

Visit #76143 @Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory

Approved

Under Project # 49156 | Research

Walker Lake Glacial Moraine Dating

research_scientist - Dartmouth College

Reservation Members(s)

Carly Peltier May 5 - 9, 2022 (5 days)
Victoria Halvorson May 5 - 9, 2022 (5 days)

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Lodging (nightly) 2 May 6 - 9, 2022