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Books in Quaternary geology

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11-13 of 13 results in All results

The Quaternary Period in the United States

  • 1st Edition
  • Volume 1
  • December 17, 2003
  • A.R. Gillespie + 2 more
  • English
  • Hardback
    9 7 8 - 0 - 4 4 4 - 5 1 4 7 0 - 7
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 4 7 4 0 9 - 0
This book reviews advances in understanding of the past ca. two million years of Earth history - the Quaternary Period - in the United States. It begins with sections on ice and water - as glaciers, permafrost, oceans, rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Six chapters are devoted to the high-latitude Pleistocene ice sheets, to mountain glaciations of the western United States, and to permafrost studies. Other chapters discuss ice-age lakes, caves, sea-level fluctuations, and riverine landscapes. With a chapter on landscape evolution models, the book turns to essays on geologic processes. Two chapters discuss soils and their responses to climate, and wind-blown sediments. Two more describe volcanoes and earthquakes, and the use of Quaternary geology to understand the hazards they pose. The next part of the book is on plants and animals. Five chapters consider the Quaternary history of vegetation in the United States. Other chapters treat forcing functions and vegetation response at different spatial and temporal scales, the role of fire as a catalyst of vegetation change during rapid climate shifts, and the use of tree rings in inferring age and past hydroclimatic conditions. Three chapters address vertebrate paleontology and the extinctions of large mammals at the end of the last glaciation, beetle assemblages and the inferences they permit about past conditions, and the peopling of North America. A final chapter addresses the numerical modeling of Quaternary climates, and the role paleoclimatic studies and climatic modeling has in predicting future response of the Earth's climate system to the changes we have wrought.

Ice Age Southern Andes

  • 1st Edition
  • Volume 3
  • November 12, 2003
  • C.J. Heusser
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 5 3 4 3 8 - 1
The Southern Andes, stretching from the subtropics to the subantarctic, are ideally located for palaeoenvironmental research. Over the broad and continuous latitudinal extent of the cordillera (-24Ëš), vegetation is adjusted to climatic gradients and atmospheric circulation patterns.Opposed to the prevailing Southern Westerlies, the Southern Andes are positioned to receive the brunt of the winds, while biota are set to record the shifting of incoming storm systems over time. Sequential, latitudinally-placed, sedimentary deposits containing microfossils and macroremains, as archives of past vegetation and climate, make possible the detection of equatorward and poleward displacement of plant communities and, as a consequence, changes in climatic controls. No terrestrial setting in the Southern Hemisphere is so unique for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction during and since the last ice age. Twenty radiocarbon-dated fossil pollen and spore records chosen to place emphasis on the last ice age include high-resolution, submillennial data sets that also cover the Holocene, thus providing contrast between present interglacial and past glacial ages. From a refined data base, the records constitute the foundation for interpreting factors responsible for vegetation change over >50,000 14C years, glacial-interglacial migration and refugial patterns for a diversity of taxa, and the extent of intrahemispheric and polar hemispheric synchroneity versus asynchroneity.

Quaternary Dating Methods

  • 1st Edition
  • Volume 7
  • April 1, 2000
  • W.C. Mahaney
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 8 6 8 4 8 - 6