UTILIZING IMPROVED METHODOLOGY TO DELINEATE PALEOWAVE ENERGY PROXIES OF LAKE BONNEVILLE

The lacustrine landforms of the late Pleistocene lake known as Lake Bonneville are a rich archive of features that have been investigated to understand the climate during the termination of the last glacial maximum. Paleowave energy proxies (i.e. fetch, aspect, and paleo-shorezone slope) coupled with landform type, distribution, orientation, and size can act as important indicators of the climatic conditions present during the lake’s development. An adapted methodology was developed within GIS to obtain a quick and systematic procedure for a detailed spatial analysis of the lake’s fetch, the aspect of the paleoshoreline, and the slope of the paleo-shorezone. The improved GIS methodology 1) drastically enhances the ability to systematically generate these proxies of paleowave energy with precision and accuracy; 2) is expected to aid in the development of improved hydrodynamic models of the lake and climate; and 3) is expected to provide a greater understanding of the distribution of landforms in the basin. For example, the preliminary trends seen within the data set may confirm the proposed hypotheses that suggest that storms during the late Pleistocene were larger than today’s and that the direction of many of these prevalent storms were from the north.