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10th CAVEPS and Quaternary Extinction Symposium
March 29 - April 2, 2005
Naracoorte, SA, Australia

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“The World of Elephants”
Hot Springs, South Dakota, USA September 22-25,  2005

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The Quaternary Times
Newsletter of the American Quaternary Association
Volume 29 Number 2 December 1999

News from the AMQUA Council

• Global Lacustrine Drilling to 800m
• High Success on High Seas: IMAGES
• AMQUA Outreach: Expert Web Page
• Recent Developments in Terrestrial Geosciences

Global Lacustrine Drilling to 800 m

Initiatives of the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) community have produced a consensus on the need for long cores from lakes relating directly to the controversy around millennial-scale paleoclimatic events over the last two glacial periods, to testing their regional to global synchroneity, and to studying non-linear patterns of abrupt events and transitions, and N-S Hemispheric correlations. A PAGES Task Force (organized in 1996) currently has targeted more than 20 prioritized sites worldwide for 200+m cores.

Emi Ito AMQUA Councilor for
Geochronology-Geophysics-Geochemistry

High Success on the High Seas: IMAGES

The Marion Dufresne at the mouth of Nansen Fjord, East Greenland on August. 28, 1999. Photo by Yan Dexcotte.

IMAGES (International Marine Global Change Study), a program within IGBP-PAGES was initiated in January 1997 to address the mechanisms and consequences of global climate change using marine sediment records. The French research vessel Marion Dufresne is the ship used to realize the IMAGES goals. This ship is equipped with a specially designed giant piston corer, the Calypso Corer, capable of recovering up to 60 m long records. In the summer of 1999, the IMAGES V campaign on the Marion Dufresne fulfilled the coring goals of IMAGES Working Group 1: North Atlantic high resolution study of the variability of surface and deep water hydrology in relation with local and global climate. This cruise was an enormous undertaking to obtain high resolution Holocene cores from high sedimentation rate areas, such as fjords, estuaries, and sediment drifts in the North Atlantic. It involved scientists from France, Germany, USA, Canada, UK, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Tunisia, with as many as 60 scientists aboard the ship at one time. The Co-chief scientists on the five legs included Elisabeth Michel, Rainer Zahn, Tom Cronin and Gregory Mountain on Leg 1, Jean-Louis Turon and Claude Hillaire-Marcel on Leg 2, Jean-Louis Turon, Laurent Labeyrie and Eystein Jansen on Leg 3, Laurent Labeyrie, Anne Jennings, and David Anderson on Leg 4, and Nicolas Thouveney, Francis Grousset, Serge Berne, Jose Abel Flores and Joachim Schonfeld on Leg 5. The cruise began in Guadeloupe on June 10, 1999 and ended almost three months later in Marseille after travelling 20,963 nautical miles, reaching sites above 77.30 N, and collecting 148 cores, the longest one being over 58 m. Cores were collected in the Chesapeake Bay, the Saguenay Fjord, Lake Melville, and the Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Norwegian, and Spitsbergen margins, among other areas. For more information about IMAGES, or the IMAGES V campaign, visit the IMAGES home page at http://www.images-pages.org/start.html

Anne Jennings
Marine Geoprocesses Councilor

AMQUA Outreach: Expert Web Page

Scott Elias, an AMQUA councilor in paleobiology, is spearheading the development of a web site that will allow students and members of the general public to track down information on the Quaternary of the United States. Scott will develop a page with links to regional experts. At this stage, he needs AMQUA members to respond by volunteering to serve as a regional expert, or by sending him names of experts who might be willing to answer questions that come their way. Please send Scott names for the following regions: Southeastern U.S., South-central U.S., Southwestern U. S., Northeastern U. S., North-central U. S., Northwestern U. S., and Alaska. The proposed topics requiring expertise are: Pleistocene and Holocene environments (i.e., paleoclimate), Pleistocene glaciations, Pleistocene and Holocene vegetation, Pleistocene animals, and Late Wisconsin (Paleoindian) archaeology. Scott also intends to have links with the Mexican Quaternary Association (Union Mexicana para Estudios del Cuaternario) and the Canadian Quaternary Association (CANQUA). He will contact the experts you suggest, to see if they are willing to participate. Scott’s e-mail address is: saelias@colorado.edu

Recent Developments in Terrestrial Geosciences

As was nicely described by Ardith Hansel (past-chair of the Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division of GSA) and David Butler (past chair of the Geomorphology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers) in the recent "1998 Geoscience Highlights" issue of Geotimes , there has been a great deal of activity in the subdisciplinary area of Terrestrial Geoprocesses (TG). Although the following provides only a brief overview of some of this activity, it does provide some insights into the diverse nature of the research and new research directions that presently characterize TG. Perhaps one of most exciting areas of research in TG is the continued development and refinement of a relatively new and remarkably powerful means of dating terrestrial surfaces—cosmogenic surface age dating. There are many examples of recently published papers that illustrate this, but as Hansel noted, a few of these papers provide especially good examples of how this technique has been the key to developing fresh new perspectives on the ages and formative processes associated with subglacial erosional surfaces and bedrock pediments (the latter perhaps one of the more enigmatic types of geomorphic surfaces). Butler noted that many important papers were published in areas that apparently represent "hot topics" in geomorphology—including geomorphic responses to climate change, mass movement processes in tectonically active, high mountain ranges, applications of chaos theory and the concept of nonlinear dynamical systems in geomorphic research, and biogeomorphic research. Naturally, there has also been continued interest in the applications of soils studies in many types of

Pete Birkeland in front of a alleged ancient "paleosol' formed in Precambrian Boulder Creek Granodiorite. At this field stop, participants of the GSA field trip debated the interpretation of this feature as a deeply weathered Oxisol (formed as a product of weathering in a tropical climate) or as a soil that has been strongly diagenetically altered (as suggested by patterns of reddish coloration and iron chemistry, changes in bulk chemistry and other features).

research in TG, including, for example, the role of accumulation and loss of soil organic and inorganic C in the global carbon cycle, the role of chemical weathering and soil development in global climate and climate change, and controls of weathering on the geomorphic evolution of active mountain belts. There is also continued interest in using soil chronosequence studies as a tool for providing geomorphic surface ages and elucidating landform development (e.g., hillslopes, dunes, rock pavements).

In the past year there were at least two superb GSA field trips to sites of some classic studies of soil stratigraphy and soil- landscape evolution. AMQUA Past-President Vance Holliday led a trip to examine the Quaternary stratigraphy of the Southern High Plains in March.

Pete Birkeland and several of his colleagues led a field trip immediately following the Denver GSA conference which provided 20 geoscientists an opportunity to look at results of soil-geomorphic studies over past 25 years in the Colorado Front Range. The trip also provided the participants with a great opportunity to observe how studies of well-developed soils with complex argillic and calcic horizons can be used to evaluate the magnitude and processes associated with the accidental dispersal of radiogenic materials from the large Pu-production facility at Rocky Flats.

Leslie McFadden
Terrestrial Geosciences Councilor