Ice-walled melt ponds on the surfaces of active valley-floor rock glaciers and Matthes (Little Ice Age) moraines in the southern Sierra Nevada indicate that most of these landforms consist of glacier ice under thin (ca. 1 - 10 m) but continuous covers of rock-fall-generated debris. These debris blankets effectively insulate the underlying ice and greatly reduce rates of ablation relative to that of uncovered ice. Such insulation explains the observations that ice-cored rock glaciers in the Sierra, actually debris-covered glaciers, are apparently less sensitive to climatic warming and commonly advance to lower altitudes than do adjacent bare-ice glaciers. Accumulation-area ratios and toe-to-headwall-altitude ratios used to estimate equilibrium-line altitudes (ELAs) of former glaciers may therefore yield incorrect results for cirque glaciers subject to abundant rockfall. Inadvertent lumping of deposits from former debris-covered and bare-ice glaciers partially explains an apparently anomalous regional ELA gradient reported for the pre-Matthes Recess Peak Neoglacial advance. Distinguishing such deposits may be important to studies that rely on paleo-ELA estimates. Moreover, Matthes and Recess Peak ELA gradients along the crest evidently depend strongly on local orographic effects rather than latitudinal climatic trends, indicating that simple linear projections and regional climatic interpretations of ELA gradients of small glaciers may be unreliable.

The depression of snowlines, or equilibrium-line altitudes, of alpine glaciers is often used by glacial geologists to infer variations in mass balance. The climatic interpretation of snowline depression, however, is complicated by the number of factors that control glacier mass balance. The simple lapse-rate method of temperature interpretation ignores the effects of changes in radiation and snow accumulation. The statistical approach to temperature interpretation, which regresses precipitation and temperature against snowline altitude, neglects the effect of radiation. The most comprehensive approach for the climatic interpretation of snowline depression couples the heat and mass balances of a glacier surface. A sensitivity analysis that utilizes the coupled heat- and mass-balance approach indicates that the ∼1000-m variation in snowline of alpine glaciers on glacial-to-interglacial time scales could be a result of significant changes in temperature, and to a lesser extent changes in insolation. Snowline variations are sensitive only to relatively large changes in annual accumulation, which should also be evident in other proxy records of moisture change. The approaches outlined here provide glacial geologists with a summary of how various climatic forcings associated with glaciation may be quantified from snowline data.

Late-Pleistocene glacial sequences at McGee, Pine, and Bishop creeks, in the east-central Sierra Nevada, are resolvable into distinct relative-age groups on the basis of soil development, the weathering of surface and subsurface clasts, and geomorphic criteria. The data differentiate moraines from Tioga and Tahoe glaciations at McGee Creek, and Tioga, Tahoe, and pre-Tahoe/post-Sherwin glaciations at Pine and Bishop creeks; no moraines from a Tenaya glaciation are differentiated by the data, perhaps because the soil-geomorphic methods are not sensitive enough to resolve small age differences between moraines. The lack of fine age resolution is probably due to a combination of factors, including (1) slow rates of soil development, (2) low amounts of atmospheric dust added to the soils, (3) the susceptibility of crest soils to erosion, and (4) the susceptibility of footslope soils to burial by colluvium. Age resolution is improved by evaluating soils at both the moraine crests and the relatively wetter footslope sites, and by basing age assignments on a combination of macro- and micromorphologic soil properties, the disintegration of subsurface clasts, and parameters of surface-clast weathering.

A peaty marsh soil is sharply overlain by a sand sheet and intertidal mud at tidal marshes near Tofino and Ucluelet, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Foraminifera and vascular plant fossils show that the buried soil was submerged suddenly and was covered quickly by sand. Radiocarbon ages place this event between 100 and 400 yr ago. The coastal subsidence suggested by the submergence occurred in an area of net late Holocene emergence, perhaps during the most recent great earthquake on the northern part of the Cascadia subduction zone. The sand sheet overlying the peaty soil records the tsunami triggered by this earthquake. Similar stratigraphic sequences of about the same age have been reported from estuaries along the outer coasts of Washington and northern Oregon, suggesting that hundreds of kilometers of the Cascadia subduction zone may have ruptured during one, or a series of plate-boundary earthquakes less than 400 yr ago.

Experiments carried out under temperatures and relative humidities that approximate ambient conditions show that the rate of hydration of obsidian is a function of the relative humidity, as well as of previously established variables of temperature and obsidian chemical composition. Measurements of the relative humidity of soil at 25 sites and at depths of between 0.01 and 2 m below ground show that in most soil environments, at depths below about 0.25 m, the relative humidity is constant at 100%. We have found that the thickness of the hydrated layer developed on obsidian outcrops exposed to the sun and to relative humidities of 30-90% is similar to that formed on other portions of the outcrop that were shielded from the sun and exposed to a relative humidity of approximately 100%. Surface samples of obsidian exposed to solar heating should hydrate more rapidly than samples buried in the ground. However, the effect of the lower mean relative humidity experiences by surface samples tends to compensate for the elevated temperature, which may explain why obsidian hydration ages of surface samples usually approximate those derived from buried samples.

In a dissected, mostly sandy terrain along the Rio Grande valley border of southern New Mexico, a reddish-brown coarse-loamy Haplargid in an eolian deposit has a stage II carbonate horizon that is typical of soils of the Leasburg surface (8000-15,000 yr B.P.). The eolian deposit buries sediments and soils of late Pleistocene age or older. Thus, it does not fit in the chronological framework of the stepped sequence of geomorphic surfaces along the valley border, in which age of the surfaces and their soils increases with increasing elevation of the steps. Because the eolian deposit occurs in isolated areas where its age relative to the stepped sequence cannot be demonstrated geomorphically, soil characteristics are major tools for placing the deposit and its soil in the chronological scheme for the area. On the basis of the stage II carbonate horizon, the eolian deposit is considered to be an eolian analog of Leasburg alluvium. One of the Leasburg Haplargids in eolian sediments on a ridge crest has a total of 23 kg/m2 of pedogenic carbonate. Downslope in an area that receives runoff from higher areas, a fine-loamy Haplargid in Leasburg alluvium has 186 kg/m2 of carbonate; a nearby coarse-loamy Haplargid that does not receive runoff has only 46 kg/m2 of carbonate. Thus, landscape position and texture have a major influence on the total amount of pedogenic carbonate, which can range to more than eightfold in soils of Leasburg age.

A paleoclimatic record for a southern Great Plains locality (the Aubrey Clovis site in north-central Texas) has been established using stable carbon and oxygen isotopes. Detailed composite stratigraphic sections, constrained by 14 C ages, place the age of these deposits between 14,200 and 1600 yr B.P. Calcium carbonate samples of lacustrine and pedogenic origin were analyzed. Oxygen isotopic compositions of most of these in situ carbonates reflect equilibrium precipitation from local meteoric waters. Oxygen isotope values reflect changes in the composition of meteoric waters tied to changes in the isotopic composition of moisture derived from the Gulf of Mexico. Oxygen isotopic variability at the Aubrey site is coincident with marine isotopic records from the gulf that vary due to changes in Laurentide ice sheet volume and meltwater influx. The stable carbon isotopic record, reflecting changing biomass through time, corroborates humid versus arid interpretations based on sedimentology and rates of alluviation. A middle Holocene arid period was in contrast to moist early and late Holocene climate, affirming interpretations of other workers studying southern Great Plains Holocene climate history.

A radiocarbon-dated pollen record near the Boylston Street Fishweir site in Boston; Massachusetts, provides a regional and local record of vegetation changes from the middle Holocene to present. The stratigraphy begins about 5630 ± 90 yr B.P. with a marine transgression and is continuous up to the historic backfilling of the Back Bay area about 100 yr B.P. When pollen began accumulating at the site, the immediate area resembled the swamp forests growing today in southern New England. Fresh- and brackish-water vegetation was present before the area near the site was submerged. While these vegetation changes occurred locally, oak forest grew in the region. Correlation of this stratigraphy with archaeological data collected from 500 Boylston Street indicates that between 4700 and 3700 yr B.P., a number of fence-like alignments ("weirs"), were probably placed within existing channels and/or along shorelines to capture fish and other marine animals as they moved with the tidal flow.

Stable carbon isotope ratios of total organic matter were measured in two cores collected from the Kashiru peatbog in Burundi, Equatorial Africa. The record, which spans at least the last 40,000 yr, documents the C3-C4 biomass balance in the organic sediment. Among the major modern peat formers, most plants are C3 species and are characterized by δ13C values of -25.5 ± 2.3% (vs PDB). The C4 plants, which are characterized by higher δ13C values (-11.3 ± 0.7%) belong to the Gramineae (Miscanthidium sp.) and Cyperaceae families (Cyperus latifolius, C. papyrus, Pycreus nigricans). In the fossil record, δ13C values of total organic matter vary between -28 and -15% in response to the relative fluxes of C3 and C4 plants. Before 30,000 yr B.P., low δ13C values (-23.5 ± 1.1%) match high arboreal pollen contents. From 30,000 to 15,000 yr B.P., higher δ13C values (-17.6 ± 1.1%) correspond to a significant increase in percentages of grass pollen. During this episode, a short and sharp shift toward lighter carbon isotopic compositions at 21,000 yr B.P. is synchronous with higher input of arboreal pollen. From 15,000 to 12,000 yr B.P., the 13C content decreases (δ13C = -22.9 ± 1.4%). This shift, which cannot be explained by an increase in the arboreal vegetation, could be explained by the spreading of C3 Gramineae or C3 Cyperaceae. The interval from 12,000 to 7000 yr B.P. is poorly documented in these cores due to much lower organic matter accumulation. Low δ13C values (δ13C = -25.2 ± 1.3%) are observed from 7000 to 5000 yr B.P., when the pollen data show development of C3 mountain forest. The Late Holocene is characterized by a mixed C3-C4 organic matter accumulation (δ13C = -20.9 ± 1.6%). This study depicts a change in the dominant photosynthetic pathway among the herbaceous components, notably at the glacial-interglacial transition, when C3 plants were favored by increased water supply and/or higher atmospheric CO2 concentration.

The Miami site, excavated in 1937, is in a small "playa" basin on the High Plains surface. The site is one of the earliest documented co-occurrences of Clovis points and mammoth. Reinvestigation of the site and related collections was undertaken to better understand the stratigraphy, geochronology, and archaeology. The basin, 23 m diameter × 1.6 m deep, filled with (1) dark gray silty clay, and (2) near the top of the section, a lens of well-sorted silt or loess. The basin started to fill ca. 13,700 yr B.P., the loess dates to ca. 11,400 yr B.P., and the bone bed probably dates to ca. 11,400-10,500 yr B.P. The loess may be the local manifestation of a "Clovis drought." The partial remains of five mammoths (three adults and two juveniles) were recovered in 1937; no other animal remains are known. The bone is heavily weathered and there are no clear indications of human modification. Artifacts found at the site include three Clovis points and a scraper found among the bones and two flakes and a scraper found on the surface near the playa. The origins of the bone and stone assemblage are uncertain but four scenarios are offered: a successful mammoth kill, an unsuccessful kill with wounded animals dying at the watering hole, opportunistic scavenging following natural deaths, or a palimpsest of multiple deaths following both natural and human causes.