Much of my research is aimed at interpreting geologic records of climate change, including those recorded in landforms produced by alpine glaciers and sediment that accumulates in lake basins. Much of my recent work in this area has been focused on the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah, where the following projects are active:

1) Late Quaternary Glacial and Paleoclimate History of the Uinta Mountains: I received funding from the National Science Foundation Geology & Paleontology program to core 20 lakes in the Uintas in the hopes of constraining the timing of deglaciation through radiocarbon dating of basal organics in lake basins. This effort is a component of a larger project involving David Mickelson, Brad Singer (U. Wisconsin-Madison), and Ben Laabs (SUNY-Geneseo) who are attempting to determine the timing of the last glacial maximum in the Uintas through ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al dating of erratic boulders. Together our work should allow us to further test our theory that glaciers in the western Uintas were controlled by moisture derived from Lake Bonneville while those at the east end of the range fluctuated more directly with insolation-driven climate changes.

2) High-Resolution Records of Holocene Drought and Monsoon Behavior from the Uinta Mountains: I received funding from the National Science Foundation Earth Systems History program to retrieve lake sediment cores from two lakes in the Uinta Mountains likely to contain high-resolution records of Holocene paleoclimate. This work is collaborative with Katrina Moser (U. Western Ontario), David Porinchu (The Ohio State University), and Glen MacDonald (UCLA). To date we have retrieved cores from 6 lakes located at the extreme eastern and western ends of the range. Analysis of these cores began in fall, 2005.

3) Lacustrine Records of the Little Ice Age from the Uinta Mountains: Ben Laabs (U. Wisconsin-Madison), Jeremy Shakun (Middlebury College, now U. Massachusetts-Amherst) and I traveled to the Uintas in March 2003 to retrieve a sediment core from Water Lily Lake, located on the east side of the Yellowstone River valley near the Swift Creek confluence. Preliminary results, presented at the 2003 GSA meeting, indicate that the Water Lily Lake core spans the termination of the early/middle Holocene Altithermal Period and this transition was accompanied by fairly dramatic changes in the sedimentary environment of the lake. You can view photos of the coring trip here.

4) Application of Historical Rephotography to Identify and Quantify Changes in the Near-Treeline Forest of the Uinta Mountains since the End of the Little Ice Age: I'm also pursuing a rephotography project comparing historical photos of the upper subalpine landscape in the Uintas taken by the Hayden Survey in 1870, with new photos taken from the original photopoints during July 2001. Dramatic changes in treeline and relative tree/shrub abundance are visible in the photo pairs, and I’m quantifying these changes through digital analyses of the paired photos. Because the original photographs were taken within a few decades of the end of the Little Ice Age in other western ranges (ca. A.D. 1850), it is assumed that the changes in vegetation distribution are related to post-LIA warming. Results of this work were the basis for my poster presentation at the AMQUA conference in Anchorage in 2002, and were published in Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research in November 2003. I continued this work in August 2003 and 2004, replicating photographs taken in the upper Bear River Drainage by Timothy O’Sullivan of the 1869 King Survey, with funding from the American Alpine Club. Those photos were published in the Summer 2007 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly.

Other Projects

5) Glacial Geology of the Central Tibetan Plateau: I have also worked in western China where Pat Colgan (Grand Valley State University) and I initiated a project studying the glacial history of the Tibetan Plateau in conjunction with Professor Zhou Shangzhe of Guangzhou University. We spent three weeks in July 2002 on an expedition to investigate the glacial record in the Tanggula Shan, a range on the border between the Qinghai and Xizang Provinces. Glacial deposits are well preserved in the range, and we hope to use surface exposure dating methods to determine the timing of past glaciations (in conjunction with Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont). Deposits of at least three separate glaciations were identified, along with abundant features related to the Little Ice Age. The Tanggula are one of the highest ranges in the central Plateau, and dating of the end moraines should provide a strong challenge to the theory that an ice sheet covered the Plateau during the Last Glacial Maximum. We are also interested to see how the timing of the local LGM compares to the time of maximum glacial advance in the Himalayas further south. Details of this work were presented at the 2003 INQUA congress and additional results were presented at the 2004 GSA meeting in Denver. A summary of project results was published in Quaternary Research in 2006. Photos from the fieldwork are available here.

6) Development of Alpine Soils in the Northeastern U.S.: I continue to be interested in alpine soils of the northeastern U.S. Most of the work focused on the alpine zones of the region’s highest mountains has dealt with ecology or botany, and surprisingly little is known about the history of these soils and their development over time. This oversight is unfortunate because the alpine zones are continually threatened by increased recreational impacts and the real possibility of future climate change. Work I began with a Middlebury student in the fall of 2004 is shedding light on the pedogenic pathways followed by these soils, as well as the rates of their formation. A paper presenting soil chemistry and parent material investigations appeared in Catena in 2007, while a second paper detailing the distribution and morphology of the summit soils is currently in review at the Soil Science Society of America Journal.

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Last updated by J. Munroe 9/11/07