THE CURRENT AND FUTURE STATE OF NORTH AMERICAN GREAT PLAINS AEOLIAN DUNEFIELD CHRONOLOGIES

The North American Great Plains contain ubiquitous aeolian dunefields, which, in the absence of traditional drought proxies, serve as sensitive indicators of prehistoric drought. Dunefields in the Great Plains are responsive to drought conditions because during time of decreased moisture, stabilizing vegetation diminishes, and sand succumbs to the erosive force of the wind. For nearly half a century, researchers have used combinations of geomorphic, stratigraphic, and chronologic data (i.e., radiocarbon and luminescence) to develop dunefield chronologies that help delineate periods of prehistoric climate change, namely drought. These chronologies are particularly significant to the region because they and their associated loess records are the only long-term record of drought, which in some cases span over 20,000 years. Despite the many currently published chronologies, correlating regional periods of dune activity between individual dunefields remains difficult. This consequently makes interpreting prehistoric climate change complex. Further limitations to existing chronologies are numerous temporal and spatial data gaps, which result from unintentional biases in sampling, a preferential bias of chronologies to only record the youngest episode of dune activity, significant advancements in dating techniques and resolution, and insufficient understanding of non-climatic controls on dune activity in the Great Plains. In this poster we visualize the spatial and temporal patterns of current Great Plains dunefield chronologies and highlight the gaps in these chronologies. We conclude with suggested considerations for future research, which include better mapping of Great Plains dunefields, development of new chronologies based on systematic sampling strategies that can address the gaps in current data sets, and expansion in the number of paleoclimatic records from non-dune proxies of the Great Plains, especially those spanning several millennia.