Department of Geosciences Seminar Series
Dan Ibarra - Brown University
Friday April 8, 2022
12:30PM
Austin 108
Ancient lakes and lithium: connecting past warm-wet states to an emerging natural resource
The presence or absence of lakes in terminal basins provide an unequivocal measure of wetness. In this talk I will show that wetter conditions during both colder- and warmer-than-present periods in the past are recorded in shoreline and outcrop data from the latest Pleistocene and the middle-Pliocene. Using hydrologic scaling relationships, I demonstrate that: 1) Pleistocene lakes during glacial maxima in the northern Great Basin do not require substantial precipitation increases to explain many lake shoreline extents; and 2) middle-Pliocene lakes would have required up to a doubling of precipitation in the southwest. These inferences provide quantitative targets for assessing the performance of climate model simulations of the terrestrial water cycle. Further, I will show ongoing work associated with this work linking lithium accumulation in a lacustrine basin to past climate via evapoconcentration.
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/dibarra
For more information, contact: Christin Donnelly at christin.donnelly@uconn.edu