The Tulare Lake Project: A 35,000-year record of lake level constraining precipitation and stream discharge from the southern Sierra Nevada of California, USA

Abstract:

Building upon earlier works by Harding (1949), Atwater et al. (1986) and Davis (1999), research centered at CSU Bakersfield over the past 15 years has generated a high resolution paleoclimate history with water resource implications for one of the world’s great agricultural centers, the San Joaquin Valley of California. Lake level is based upon aerial mapping of geomorphological features (e.g., sand spits and shorelines), lithologic features exposed in trenches from opposite sides of the lake basin (e.g., marsh deposits), and proxy data from core (e.g., clay %). Age control was provided by radiocarbon dating of charcoal, mussel shells, and bulk organic matter and by paleomagnetic secular variation dating. From oldest to youngest, highlights include: 1. millennial-scale variations at the base of the record, 2. evidence for avulsion of the Kings River into Tulare Lake at or near the time of maximum glaciation in the Sierra Nevada as predicted by Weissman et al. (2005), 3. lake-level changes during the early and middle Holocene that vary in tune with eastern Pacific sea-surface temperatures from marine core records. This includes an unusually wet period starting at 12,500 cal B.P. followed by a dramatic, rapid drop in lake level at 7,500 cal B.P. Evidence for the former feature includes geochemical (leaf wax n-alkane markers for grass) and petrographic (grass phytolith) data. The latter feature represents an abrupt decrease in Sierran Stream discharge equal to several millions of acre-ft/yr. 4. A centuries-long increase in lake level commencing in the 13^th or 14^th century based on both lake-level reconstructions from the LBDA of Cook et al. (2010) and dated fine-grained sediments exposed in high-elevation trenches (Negrini et al., 2006), 5. A flood deposit identified in the uppermost sediments exposed in the southeastern edge of the lake that has a radiocarbon age consistent with that of an early 17^th century flood found in the sediments of the Santa Barbara Channel (Schimmelmann et al., 1998).