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Effects of Climate Change on Soils in Glacial Deposits, Wind River Basin, Wyoming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Robert D. Hall
Robert D. Hall*
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, Center for Earth and Environmental Science, Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis, 723 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-5132
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Abstract

Soil chronofunctions are often quasilinear, but those relationships may be only gross, fortuitous generalizations that ignore changes in soils resulting from climatic and other cyclic external influences that govern soil formation or soil degradation. In the Rocky Mountains, soil development has been extensively used to estimate the age of sediments, but the number of soils is usually few, and large ranges in values for soil data may be dismissed as “normal variation.” In a detailed study of soils in the Wind River Range and Wind River Basin, characteristics of near-surface horizons do not follow age trends. However, the underlying carbonate-bearing horizons do have age-related characteristics. This “soil paradox” may be related to glacial–interglacial cycles in which (1) wind erodes near-surface horizons and then provides new parent material and (2) cryoturbation disrupts carbonate horizons, remobilizing carbonate and changing carbonate morphology but with only minimal loss of carbonate from the soil.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Quaternary Research , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , May 1999 , pp. 248 - 261
Copyright
University of Washington

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