 Oh, you're good. Oh, you're good. Thank you. Everything is working, hasn't it? Yes. That's cool. Should I cut this? Yeah. Oh, you're good. Oh, you're good. I'm not going to have to run. It seems like it's working. Good. It's done so far. It's been easier. It's actually opened correctly. It started. Two, me and probably Paul. Oh, now I'm down to one. Paul got off. To me. It's up to you. I spent a couple months to have your two meeting work. It was last month, but no one had gone to say how to work for like 32. I'm going to have to tell Bill that he still has stuff. Yeah, I saw that. He had to write me, but he had fun. I was going to use that for whatever. It'll be a little more organized in a month. It's actually... Yeah, I've been gone. I was gone. I'm sorry? I'm sorry. I began to set that up because I figured you know what I'm saying. I'm glad you were so happy about it. I'm glad you said that. It was like a little counter, and I was like, how did you get it? I got you. I love it. Make a present. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Oh God! I'm sorry... I think you are wounded. Where I get started here give me a microphone today. I remember my gavel. Good turn out today, thanks for all of you for coming. I'm excited to have to. Any few members you would like to introduce yourself? Sure, sure. And I'm not a geologist, I'm a chemist, a microbiologist by education. This is how I'm going to... Okay, guys, there's a couple of them in the screen. I'm from Dave here. These are real geologists. And I'm going to show you how to really go hiking this day. That's all. That's why I'm going to talk more about geology. Great. Thank you. Any gaps today? So, just as a reminder, we have recycling in back to recycler cans. Peter Hielson has announced his publication. Peter, do you want to comment on that? Yeah. It's our upcoming president. We just did our call to paper for our Utah geocytes. This publication is going to be geared towards first-line teachers' geology that most of us can talk about in that project out in the state of Utah. So, it's going to be, I think, a fun project to write. We expect you to go out there and take pictures of the site and do a good write-up on it. And eight pages long. Eight to ten pages long, so much. We expect this to be a fun project to write on. We would like between 30 and 50 sites to stay in Utah. So, if everybody thinks about writing something up, if everybody wants to write, we've got a list of sites. If we don't select another one else, everybody thinks it would be a good place to go out and visit. So, it'll be fun. So, everybody's trying out for it. It's going to be a really great project. I don't think it's worth it. I definitely recommend you treat it as a very valuable resource. Okay. See, any announcements? Anybody know when the next AEG is? Is there going to be another one? September, for the next one. Just as a note, Roger Bond was nice enough to reserve our picnic site in here, same place. August, August 11th is the date that we set. So, that's where we'll be doing the annual UGA, and that's usual. So, that would be barbecue and all are welcome. Okay. Are there any other announcements? So, give us a minute before we start. Right. They were very pleased to have a cool person come down from the Great California. So, we're going to begin the talk. Joel is currently serving as the department head of the geology department at USU. He has his master's from Northern Arizona University, a PhD in geomorphology from the University of New Mexico. His research interests are vast, but primarily focus on the western interior of the United States. And he used his lab OSL and his lab uplift from where we bring along the Corral Pateau. He also will establish the Bruminecine Lab at USU, which is very unique and really well run. So, we're excited to have him come and talk to us. Everyone, welcome Joel. Can you do what you want? It's just here when we got here. Yeah, usually we don't have one. But this is a real treat to do. It's always a huge pleasure to talk about science through a broader audience of people who know what they're talking about still and are interested in geomorphology. Let's see here. I've got that. Oh, and I want to thank you. So, my VISTA co-authors here are a couple of students who recently moved out of their country. There should be. So, James and I are students who literally just from the last days or weeks have graduated from USU and finished up their work with research. And one of the advantages of being able to do this talk today is that what I'm going to show you is all really very new results that we're still finishing up these projects and they're part of the students' research and they're not published yet. And so, if I look surprised at what comes up on the slide, because I haven't given the talk before and I've stolen slides from these students for this presentation. Now, of course, Tammy is a professor who's in charge of our women's and state and lab at USU. So, she plays a key role in this and Alan is a cosmogenic, very quiet scientist at Florida's Livermore who's provided geopinology. And I want to recognize Sherm Young who's actually in the audience today sitting back there. Sherm inspired a good chunk of this work and supported it in many ways and like maybe many of you, he's a citizen geoscientist and not a study professor. So, I want to thank Sherm for being responsible for a good chunk of this. You have it. We need too much. Of course, surprise. Every week, every month. We could do that. Still not working. We can just do it if you want. Okay. Okay, I'm pretty sure I just turned it off. Yeah, I'll just do it if you want. Yeah. Okay, so this talk is going to have a few parts. First, I do want to provide some context and a little bit of sharing things background about the landscape of the Colorado Plexo, especially worked in the last 15 years about the patterns of erosion in the Colorado Plexo. And then the results that I want to show you in the middle part of the talk are from Jackson Lincoln and this is a re-founding abandoned Red Rock meander of the Colorado River so maybe many of you have seen it. It's a really beautiful view of this from across the river at Todash from the river and then also the last part of the talk will be from James Mouff's master's thesis studying in and around Moab a big chunk of Spanish valley on right outside of Moab. I want to point out really quick that the new results come from studies of river check. So in this abandoned meadon you have this great situation where the river after it cut off the meander is now over here it preserves old terraces and bed gravel of the Colorado River that are now sheltered from the erosion of the river itself. There are river gravels and if you can date these river gravels you can learn about when this cut off the meander actually occurred and then we can also do decision rates since that time so that's the highlight of the research design. Okay a little bit of background for a couple slides about patterns of landscape evolution so this is Utah and Arizona and the Four Corners that are in the center of the Colorado patch through the graphic process of my bed and of course the main drainage system is the Colorado River going through Grand Canyon here and here's the constant I want to highlight of the Green River and the Colorado River and this is from a few years ago where I compiled the work that we've done at USU well constrained of river incision from terraces like I was just describing on the pattern emerges where the erosion rates across the plateau the Colorado plateau are not very uniform and that's maybe a surprise to some people the rates at which the river is eroding the Grand Canyon in the Pleistocene but these are all Pleistocene rates and I'm going two miles away from the lake is significantly slower than some very rapid erosion rates we've helped in three years but if you go to a landscape like Hanuman National Park or Hanesville or the Henry Mountain that's a landscape that from all the measurements we have is eroding two or four times faster than Grand Canyon and so we call this the whole dive of incision in the central Colorado patch and towards the edges both upstream of the Grand Canyon area these rates of incision erosion are actually less so this is the full dive of erosion so we know that the Canyon lane country is stopping to be part of among the fastest eroding places in the whole country oh I'm sorry yeah yeah so this 450 in the Henry Mountain this is 415 meters per million years so half a kilometer per million years or that would be almost half a meter per thousand years for the coral ocean okay so also very recently and I'm also setting up a paper that's maybe not yet out of the American Journal of Science there's an important Ph.D. which is done in New York City, Arizona by Tanya Murray and she has worked extensively in southeast Utah having seen that there's a severe rapid erosion using thermal chronology the thermal chronology reaches back a few million years and dates to cooling or exclamation of rocks another way of getting that erosion over some longer time scale and just to highlight going right here in the middle of the bullseye her main result is that yes it's kind of confirming this ongoing rapid erosion and points out that much of the original exclamation of southeast Utah is all accomplished in the flyers and especially the places the majority of the erosion like kilometers of rocks would be in the contours in southeast Utah this is a plot it's actually a bunch of computer model results but it shows the results of her analysis of the mineral and that is that through time and millions of years this is the temperature of the rocks and you can see that one thing that dates was the peak of the Alive Seaman region of the heavens they have a nice new date on that and then the rocks sort of stood around buried by a couple kilometers for all of the mid-race things going and so right here, right here the rocks cool rapidly to the surface according to her data and if you look at the tick marks there the erosion of a couple kilometers of rock around the 100s in her result is literally lost two million years so very rapidly recent in the erosion in this part of the world older erosion has maintained and slowed down so that's an overall pattern and then another thing that we've done lots of studies on is how the erosion pattern might relate to the strength of rocks that rivers are encountering and then we see it goes down the cliff if a rock is harder in geomorphology we might presume that it roads more slowly and that's definitely true if you collect data across the Colorado you can make a plot like this that compares the decision rate of these different localities to the strength the actual mechanical strength measured in the laboratory the tensile strength of the rocks and there's this negative relationship where there's a strong rock associated with rocks that are slowly slowly and weak rocks and the problem is that the pattern here the weak sedimentary rock the ventroid structure is focused on the central power whereas in the Grand Canyon we've got more of these really hard rocks that there's a lot more snow ok alright so this erosion that we detect today and we're looking at patterns that we're going to get in the path together and becoming integrated out of the interior west to join the basal range to develop California and that happens five to six years and there's been a huge amount of work especially in the Grand Canyon region in a lot of debates about exactly when that happens and how did that or what portion of the Grand Canyon was quite happening until we get this wave of incision that is driving all of this but the patterns within that erosion are more complicated to be explained just by how the erosion started six million years ago and as a procedure that's the sort of bold life pattern and in fact in drainage especially in tributary there are a lot of mix zones which are interpreted more hypothetically relate to what we call transient incision that is the idea that in base level falls incision works its way upstream to the river system and over time a wave of incision will move over time upstream and the next thing that will pop up is a little classic diagram so there have been a couple of studies by a really great geomorphologist who is a student of Thomas Whitmore in Palo Alto studying this sort of long profile of rivers and the mix zones of the rivers and what they might mean in terms of the history of waves of erosion going to the region and so here's a simple diagram from a classic paper in geomorphology that shows as you follow a river from upstream to high elevation and you trace the channel down through this mouth it has a characteristic to do in profile and if you drop base level because the Colorado river drains out of a plateau and you drop base level and start erosion that creates a midpoint and that midpoint is probably upstream and this paper was about the mass behind what the other ones had how you can estimate that upstream prostration of a midpoint so what I want to point out is we're going to look at a lot of long profiles and I want to make sure that you have this picture in your mind that if you look at a drainage system and you have an inflection or a midpoint in its long profile those usually separately an upper part of the drainage that's buffering from erosion it hasn't seen that base level fall yet it hasn't made it upstream that far yet from a lower part of the drainage that's better adjusted to the stream based on and all of the actions right in this top of the deep upstream this is where you can get very rapid short term rates of erosion in a landscape in association with that moving to the system that part 2 makes sense alright that's the next slide ok so I want to show you just one slide and then we'll get into the background from a master's thesis that's still published of a student of mine in USU and she did partly some of this long profile analysis right in the immediate top down in the immediate discontinuation which is a neat landscape and it shows an example of the evidence for these waves of erosion going through the system alright so next slide here's a classical diagram no one else working on this I had my sheet monitor on my desk and I kind of thought this was going to be bigger I might do more of these for some of these so here's an old crayon drawn diagram from the form corner of the geological society diagram that came from the Colorado River and it's supposed to be an aerial view looking down on the needle spokes and all of these sources of gravity so I hope that a lot of you are familiar with this part of the world and the story here especially chanted by Peter Huntsman and others is that as the Colorado River came in it eventually penetrated the paradox of erosion in the substance and it created this space whereby these little upper plate walls could be sliding along the salt laterally collapsing into the Colorado River so the needle's fault you know in opinion of the National Park is literally a huge stale lateral spread and toppling of a landscape into the Colorado River as it's sliding from salt to the substance so we've had that picture for quite a while and it raises a cool idea about how the decision with this camera is what it started this fault system is this is sliding into a hole and also Peter Huntsman champion the notion that the Galapus coming up along the Colorado River that created structural antiquities and that's the unmoving of this canyon that has allowed for sort of dieturing up and through salt in places like that this is a paper published on the same area so here's the content and how that would be and it goes through cataract management and so this is the needle's district of Daniels National Park and this was published in 2007 this is an INSAR geodetic study that was measuring sort of real-time deformation in this part of Canyon-West National Park and the color coding here relates to vertical motion detected in the geodetic study so all the red here in this month all the red are places that they actually measure rates of substance as that is collapsing and laterally spreading and going into cataract management so this is an area that's rapidly, actively performing and we can actually measure the satellite data so the next slide here's the one slide stolen from a student-based thesis that is a really complicated one there's three drainages so there's blue, lighter blue, and red and this is the long profile that's just a watch on the south end of the diagram and it's showing that all of these drainages that cross are sculptural and have through cataract management they all have two main nick points in them, it's a really systematic pattern where just in vain and way up high it's got a nick point here and then another sort of and then a big nick point that is one in the cataract management that meets the follow-up limit and what you can do is you can take this and assume that this reach has been buffered and has not yet seen the base level fault in the cutting of cataract management and you can numerically project that people living profile out and you can estimate where it states the hollow vital limit in the contract when the decision of the panel began and one of the neat things is that all of the drainages in this part of the world all project through the same point the same elevation of the diagram of the original cataract management but some of them, this is what this is showing some of them we have to actually restore the subsidence from this little jaw of salt that is measured here so having this in-car study was showing that this area is a little bit back and that is the long profile of these rivers that actually allow this to be stable, yeah you can actually tell that this terrain here has dropped a total of 200 meters since this system began to form so you can actually start to place numbers on how much subsidence where it is happening because it is self-heconic activity around it and the next thing that will pop up is that as we all project cataract management is very quickly very quickly if you go sorry if you recall that bulldive incision we have well constrained incision rates just upstream of here and just downstream of here if you use those incision rates you realize that all of the cataract canyons are cut in the process cataract canyons is one and a half or one million years old that's all the time it takes to cut fall of cataract and has been cut cataract canyons is a paternity canyon it is a paternity canyon in fact it's sort of mid-late Pleistocene and that's kind of cool to me I said a lot of times studying Rankine and the big picture of Rankine is that if you go see Rankine Rankine is a Pleistocene canyon it is cut mostly in the Pleistocene and so as we see this erosion hitting the central plateau more recently canyons like cataract canyons are not Pleistocene canyons alright, now here's a last concept and then we'll give you some new results from this program I've been talking about this sort of propagating nick points or propagating waterfalls and crystals and when you look at a long profile of a river you can hypothesize that that nick zone is representing a wave of incision but how do you actually milk how do you actually test if that's what's going on because it's literally a moving system so the great thing we can do is we look at a river's history and study its incision rates there's a couple of cool signatures that we can look for and to my knowledge people have not really done any sort of studies before so I'm about to show you a place where we can kind of texture one of the waves of incision in the act in the geologic record so personally if you're at a single locality this is a long profile river with a nick down there that's trying to zero and if this is moving upstream of the wave of incision then if we go back in time and use river terraces if we go back in time we would say well a nick zone would have been downstream of which part of it and then downstream farther through the older terraces and so over a geologic time coming through today you see at this simple percentage point so if you're at a single point like right here and you just had a record in a single place along the terms of this thing you would see that at some point in the past there was very rapid incision and then at that point past incision would slow down more recently and there are other places where you'd have slow incision in the past that was rancid downstream of where the nick zone is now and then there are places upstream of all this where it's just slow and it's not changing because it doesn't see this wave of incision alright so here's the next quality so here's the idea that we're going to go into three different locations along the Colorado River and see if we see these paths see if we see incision rates change at a single locality at a time or if you go laterally upstream if incision rates go from slower to faster to slower that's what we're going to be seeing for now okay so here's where we're going to go so I just showed you Canyonland legal system so here's the Colorado River and the Green River above their country here's Moab to come Spanish Valley and Professor Valley is to go upstream towards Westwater Canyon and the Utah Colorado River to be the next so if there are too many places I'm going to show you a new data from our fund there's a bandit ring-con or bandit you can see everybody everybody knows that there is a boost method in each band there's all two systems we'll have them cut themselves off in case it's going to be tough so I'll show you that first and then Stephen Gaines Spanish Valley and especially the Longville Creek highlighted in white here are salt problems these are rodents in the modern day length that are associated with salt in the sub-surface and it has never really been known how active these are or what their rates are so I'm going to tell you and then this is the King Spring's endocrine also an anacline but it's not yet sort of reached important to a flat scrub and we'll have a slide about that okay so let's go to Jack's and read it back so here's just a little week-to-week arrangement and so I'm going to tell you guys I've been on river trips and hiking so the Colorado River flows right here now which is a 5-ash mine and at one point in the past it used to make huge bends and it cut this malaband in big portions right at some point it cut itself off through the net and it's flowing through and that's really behind right here even all of the turnery growls of the Colorado River that brought us a record of when this happened what's happened since okay so here's looking straight down on that same river there's that sort of arch shape and here's just quick mapping of the turnery terraces in different shapes of yellow so really quick in the lightest shape of yellow are terraces that are also we load down the landscape and follow the river on its current pathway and then as we go up we get to the orangey colors that are river gravels trapping the indigenous history or path of the river that's around that way so I'm going to I'm going to explain one thing that needs to be about this is that right here I've got the T5 that's in particular actually that is the bed of the Colorado River the day before it cut itself off and went straight so it is the abandoned chamber of the river as it cut itself off this T6 is actually a slightly higher approach that also has formed when the river was in that pathway and then by the time you get to this T4 along in the landscape all the implication of the gravel is that it's now going the path it is now also I want to point out here's the highest gravel in this area that is worth 100 meters above the Colorado River downstream a little bit and right on the rim of the spring salt on top so I'm going to show you OSL dating results from these T65 and this T8 to constrain the story there's the path so here's a little set of arrows for the way it goes on so this nice photo is up here on looking at standing on this abandoned channel of the river and looking at the slightly higher older terrace and the exposure along the pathway and so it's tough to see from where you're at but here's a couple of students who are just watching what you do and I'm just going to stand right here and actually it's the theme here of students taking pictures of me and working so here we are looking at this is that central view of the ring town and this is the terrace that actually is older right there the one I'm standing on making sure I'm taking this picture is the one that was the bed of the river when it got better and so the OSL age from the stand room in here comes back at 165,000 years old a pretty old river valley perched in this whole town here so the next picture though is on this T5 this main one that is a snapshot of the river the day before it got broken one of the cool things about this is preserved in these T5 gravels below my feet is gravel but it has because it's got a band and it's so thick and preserved in this ring town it still preserves this beautiful overbanked sand and floodplains so channel margin of sand and floodplains that you don't often see preserved in the ancient decorative terraces and it's a really great target for OSL days so literally the last flood waters that came through before the abandonment of this manor we dated in two different locations and the days were almost perfectly replicable at 128,000 years old so I would say 128,000 years ago that was literally when the river cut itself off and abandoned this it was like the day before the abandonment of this manor and the next thing is once this manor the vent the local slope sediments incorporate out as a crystal sheet and you have local washes they come out and they vary in health desserts and so this great sediment about it is local slope wash that has come down and it would provide a minimum age of when the river abandoned and that showed out really nicely so 128,000 years ago this bedrock manor cut off that and it was abandoned so that's pretty cool to my knowledge that's the first sort of history of one of the most recent work done so the next slide is just down the street on that high gravel it's noticeably higher in the landscape this is the sort of work you can do if you're a pilot man so this is me climbing down here and grabbing and grabbing all the salt water so this is the whole difference of this river gravel on this page and so from midway down this is the whole of L.A. dating that the river was up here 100 meters above its transition had about a hundred and eighty thousand pounds okay so here's a plot that I hope this this is a diagram of different river terraces at different heights up above where the modern was and then their age as you go back so this is just height above the modern and then in red here are the OSL which is what I told you about they're still working on this and if you look at this trend through time how has the river lowered and cut the damage through time this is one of the things that we found this is before the abandonment of that river and so this trend line is building this slope on this part that is that since the abandonment of this bedrock being the river there will be that really steady rate of 300 meters per million years at this locality so I really love the you know climate controls how terraces are made in rivers and it's really really noisy river will make terraces go long at a minimal size and you go through these cycles they're really noisy and confusing and if you have a long enough record you can sort of average to all the noise and get the geologic rate that the river is in size and so here is 200 meters per million years and then the cool thing here is that this highest travel is only slightly older even though it's much higher and if we believe that no message is given it suggests that there is some time in the middle time when that decision rate is very very rapid and then since the abandonment of this the decision rates are much lower and then again it's closer to wide because there is a locality where the initial indications are that at some point a couple hundred thousand years ago decision rates were really fast and since then they've slowed down to sort of a normal rate for the prodigal process of 200 meters per million years yeah so this lens that we're relating to where is the midpoint now where is that wave where the decision was passed 200,000 years ago but it's there no more okay so here's the next slide this is stolen from papers and stuff so look at this map this map Moab is right about Q and so this is Castle Valley in Professor Dunn along the Paloate River as you go on towards Grand Bridge or you come down this is Dewey Bridge at Fisher Valley a student who studied up in this reach here and he calculated an decision rate like this in terms of here near the Mount Patel Creek as well as how the community is playing around here and as you go upstream like Moab is here and that ring time if you go upstream along the Paloate River and you calculate a decision rate of the last 100,000 years you go from 200 meters to 600 here underneath the Castle Valley to really really fast so those 900 meters measure the chances that Dewey Bridge so here's a case where as you go upstream over 10 kilometers through the Paloate River system the decision rate that you see in the Lake Pleistocene get faster and faster and faster as you go upstream so this is what I'm proposing then again then just to be down there Jackson Wing on this rapid decision a couple hundred thousand years ago so then usually it's a little slower and normal if you go up here to the Castle Valley area we actually just have to go back far enough so at least recently there is a very rapid decision but then there is this next jump which is Westwater Dam and if any is just upstream along the border and then you get to Grand Valley and there's new data from Grand Valley not well published but as far as we know the decision rate is much lower than that would be so to my knowledge this is kind of the first time along at Trump River where we are able to use therapy to sort of capture this habit so we go upstream and downstream consistent with the waves of decision going through the system in the Pleistocene which is hard yeah so Bob is bringing up the question of if you have this broad bullseye there's a question of what would cause that there's some kind of uplifting going on and I guess really I would say that as you zoom in on that bullseye and start to look at what's going on it becomes more complicated you get these waves of decision and that's what it really does is it just changes the bullseye and that if you zoom in you can see and you can see where the stuff is important in the real system well no I think that's happening especially especially having a period of work we're looking at two or three kilometers of life in the Pleistocene what was your Pleistocene trigger oh well yeah no so hold on that's a point on the slide so kind of changing the downstream with the bullseye slides so your model when seeing the end of the day that yeah yeah yeah so if we unfortunately I've done a couple of research and there are no resources there's nothing there's no way I can measure the erosion but yeah yeah but this would say that that down to the cataract canyon in late Pleistocene time there would have to be really modest even less than that 200 meters but still that's still really active erosion for the rest of the rest of the time all right we've got to move on to to part three so part three is ripped off as a little bit of my graduate student James Mock who's probably the best grad student I've ever had and he among other things he was funded through EdMath through the EdMath program and there's a lot of help by Grant and others in the room to help make that work so he mapped this part so this is Spanish bound here but the town of Moab is literally right here and Helmut's Moab is quite you know about such a distance so he mapped the Spanish valley and the mountains and over here and we're trying to figure out the salt but then also there are these nice river systems that we'll talk about they go to this area and meet all of that that provide us terraces so we can actually quickly link on the stretch in the Moab Spanish valley here so we've got a cross section from any of the common credit rate across this kind of most part of Spanish valley so I'm happy to make this part of that here just to sort of show in general I'm sure many of you are familiar with this but there are several of these salt-dragging features in the hair dot spacing area and one thing they haven't come in since the last time you can see that the bedrock the core is what used to be an anaconda in the landscape so we have these broad salt anacondas they're all aligned with each other but then something has happened to make them collapse so the next one this was late last night made an anaconda so originally we would come here and there was a massive rock up and over in an anaconda and I guess a thing I want to point out here with this map that the pattern of what used to be an anaconda now if you look at the margins these rocks are all rolling over and literally in some places I think it pops into this rock in terms of what's going on it's basically sliding down into the rock and rotating like that they're all tilted into it and then it pops into this rock so that's sort of the neat pattern that was created from this map so here's a couple of big driving questions so when we know that there are these anacondas but then somehow they breach and that was such an important when did that happen and why in the existing hypothesis in a prominent area American people have studied it they've sort of made statements about it and Peter Huntune is the champion of the idea that as you erode it the power of eros is to erode this landscape you start to unload places that are canyon and that unloading of the rock that are canyon allows salt to diapirically rise and so there's definitely this picture that you're losing and allows diapirically rise but that's for places along the Colorado River places where there's diapirs and these salt problems there's something else going on here and it's also Albin and others part of the back of the bay talked about there being a connection to the downwater you were moving salt to the subservice so we're going to have that different process of salt control in this area all right so this is rotating a little bit here's the Colorado River here's the uranium mine healing site so if you drive into Moab you're going past the entrance to Archer then you come around the Colorado River Bridge and you go into the town of Moab the town of Moab is where the milk and the chaseries pass through the mine and go to the swamps to the portal where they join the Colorado River and so a lot of you are familiar with this area right? so you drive into downtown Moab stock up on whatever you need to release so you're on to the scale of salt and so an axe creek starts up and some of the milk creek on the plain goes to Lousel and I am not going to talk about tactics because I know I won't have really enough money and instead if we just follow a milk creek and see what the student James figured out milk creek and peak there's nicely preserved deposit way upstream here and then as you go downstream the two forks join and they cross the high-high-altitude at a right angle so we can use the offset of these river turns monkeys to calculate the rate at which this fault is so it turns out to be a very active point and then we're also going to follow that all the way to the Colorado River and talk about how rapidly Moab is successful so that's okay let's go back to that and so we're going to we're going to go up here of course if you drive through Spanish Valley you see there's a very beautiful high upland gravel that caps the basin where we're going to call Johnson Ridge so this next picture is looking downstream looking to the west and it's the top of the sea but this is the south fork of the milk creek with a pent-up towards Moab Moab is down here and this is the bottom of Spanish Valley and so between the south fork of the milk creek and Spanish Valley is this upland and right on the green divide is this sweet big old river valley right on that divide so the rivers were up there and that tells us this is the time before we had any addition of milk creek and it turns out to be a time before any major substance of Spanish Valley so there are these normal faults here that break up in the top of the substance of Spanish Valley one cool thing about these valleys is that they're familial gravels of milk creek and they have bigger turns in the creek than this one and also they you stand on top of this gravel you can see that they coincide with an upland circuit especially to the south that forms this continuous thick basin preserved in the uplands around Moab so we interpret that as an old plantation surface and it's really quite thick and it represents a period of time before all of this is going to coincide and all of the substance in the landscape you guys will have to read James' thesis to really believe everything I just said so the next picture we're going to go right up here to this red star in the place where we gathered plants and conducted a type of prostrogenic dating isochron burial dating where you look for cordless plants that are really deeply buried so this is we gathered plants here that were buried by 18 meters of gravel and this method of burial dating tells us that this gravel has been buried for about 1.6 million years the date's not quite right so we'll resolve this in one more part to the south of Pact Creek we also collected a second sample of this same upland deposit and it came back to the same size 1.5 million years ago this landscape around Moab was a blanket of sort of upland gravel and a foundation purpose so here's one of these diagrams again going through time going back farther now and down as the sky is the length of an elevation above Neal Creek today so this high upland gravel on another one is far way up here and it represents this big long period of little places in time and there's very very little energy in the answers and it's taking that 10 meters of gravel to use it around all of a sudden and then at some point starting with P5 at some point in the late places in time all of a sudden you can start deciding vertically all these times and that this T7 that is also up on the plank so we interpret that the fault in the long and the margin is also starting at about here so before 200,000 years ago there was a little less in theory of prolonged stability in the landscape in the stable base valley and then a couple of hundred thousand years ago the shit is a thing and these are ripping drainages and creating plot turns on two of these two to two okay and so that was up here with the example we go down here towards the mouth where it crosses the land and I want to show you the narrative about the meeting and I want to point out in 2015 there was paper published by Romero at all in the general business here where among a couple of other places they went to the strand of the high-end high fault down here and they used radio part of the meeting and they did fault trench type studies in the valley but it was a very very recent record so they were looking at faulting literally in the city limits of Moac and in this one spot where they had a valley and it was efficacious they actually came up with a rate of fault along the strand of this fault of 300,000 years so that's two or three times faster than that fault the most rapid faulting in Utah the problem is that their rate is from only the late policy in the last 2,000 years so I'm interested in if we look over along the record and get at the sort of background geologic rates outside of the Moac what is the rate of shift on this after fault okay, here's another week from Google Earth and we're floating about in the wind in Moac looking up milk peaks where there's an urban trail that goes into the spot and here's where a milk peak comes down crosses especially with the main map strand of the plain to high fault down here that homo-fueling puts up this map at the Moac all of these stars are places where we see these river gravel and then when you cross the plain to high fault the river gravel marked in the vision there's this bowling alley and a pile of gravel there's just 16 years of gravel in a pile and so there's something happening across this fault for sure and I want to point out we've got the biggest intensity of numeric ages we have are all for this boundary of stream of fault and for just that stream of fault there's just past 200,000 years since the decision was really perceived we can give you a really nicely populated area in the vision range of 529 meters away from where it's got to happen after a year or 2,000 years so fast decision just up stream of this fault and then a pile of gravel and bowling alleys just up stream of that okay this is so let's convey the species so it's a very complicated diagram it's one of my last ones so let's see if we can parse this out now here is a cherry cherry that comes down through the canyon right above the plain to high fault there's all these terraces we've lived ages ago and then it crosses the plain to high fault and instead of a bunch of terraces with a canyon we have rendings of basins and here's about the gravel basins fault and right behind that bowling alley we've got three different numeric ages to range from 140,000 to base to about 100,000 100,000 years old and that coincides this T4 is dated to 110,000 years old so as the river crosses here we've got a dating here that's about 100,000 years old and we've got a cherry that's about 100,000 years old but there's been this much awesome on the plain to high fault ground that's exposed right here but that can just simply go 439 meters to where it is on the exposed part of the plain to high fault zone the other students who I haven't stolen from yet is mapped from Elsemer and Bollack and we think there are other streams this plain to high fault zone that are in the sub-surface and we also see the basins will be in the town of Bollack and it appears to be real down into the basin so now things are really jockeying here and not all of the motion is just on the exposed part of the plain to high fault zone so as we continue through downtown Bollack and the crossing we eventually will make it out to the swamps towards the Colorado River before it punches through and that goes downstream and we know from Helmetsworth in other words actually inspired by the really minefield that well and other evidence to indicate that there's a few hundred meters where the gravel is beneath the Colorado River out here well that's a way at least a hundred meters of gravel at this scale and that's a whole because it's decided in a few any gravels from here where you can make them so we've got the rapid incisional cure and we've got even more rapid substance here and when you put those together you plot on a lot of a lot of salt from this area so now this is the maximum and we don't know the age of these gravels we're just totally guessing that maybe maybe this teapot of what it seems maybe those gravels are about the age of the gravel to the bottom of this heart but if that was true there was a maximum substance here about a kilometer from one of these underneath more so in the title I said more I have a single more I have a single and about a meter per thousand meters and that was actually even faster twice as fast as the slot canyons are eroding upstream of more and that's faster so okay so this is this is the final summary of this sort of geometric picture so it's the same diagram following milky down to the canyons crossing the canyons and going down into this basin which is worked down into the substance underneath the more I've found underneath the calm and then the Colorado River controlling the basin level so one kind of cool thing is that as the Colorado River incisors this is the base level control for the basin one thing that's needed is that the rate of incision on the Colorado River and the rate of incision not to your trot to the bottom of the basin are really similar right incision to the back so as the Colorado River drops that incision signal is pocketed into milky and you can see point to point and so you have these up to the ground and scope is there and you can take that up and gravel you can do that in your profile and you can sort of see how much substance that you have in milky valley students goes up to the ground so this is the kind of incision to go up here but then in the ground there's actually been a huge amount of substance and the total amount of substance is accommodated by the river valley and also by the gravel to the river so I showed you about a thousand years of this substance below the river but then the two substance romantic relative to the keel you have to add on the total base level following incision for the next one the part of the world and I guess the last point the sort of hypothesis that's never really been explored or studied or learned is this groundwater connection how can you have a Colorado River cut down and how can you have this basin faster than the Colorado River is incision and Colorado River is incision but it is faster making this hole in the ground and there must be this groundwater connection and there are points here that study the groundwater so as the Colorado River drops it is the control for the decimals and the groundwater in the valley so if it drops 500 meters the groundwater cable drops and as the groundwater cable drops hypothetically that allows this groundwater pulling along the valley to encounter parts of the paradox that are not just a bunch of touch with this old catwalk so as you see paradox we all know that but it's just fine so as the river decides the groundwater cable follows it it encounters fresh salt with the paradox dissolves it to the groundwater system the river removes it faster than the river is incision and this hole is being made by groundwater removal of salt and that is all hypocritical but this is the first study that actually says well yeah this really makes sense and we talked about rates and it seems like this has to be going on and we can't think of an ultimate hypothesis for why that valley would be seen so fast faster than the incision are we done? and so I guess the Central Plateau is running like crazy in the Pleistocene and it looks like that the erosion is marked by link zones and waves of incision going upstream for the river systems and the youngest wave of incision on the Colorado River has about 200,000 years ago and it dropped based on about 200 years these are things we can put numbers on now and it's up maybe in Westwater Canyon now but over that time there was this long period of middle Pleistocene sort of quiet in the landscape for a second and then I was going to ask folks in the audience to ask this question before this is why the Colorado River dropped space level 200,000 years ago why would that result there's no really good reason why that would result in many different little waves of incision and so the question is this sort of implies that in South Eastern Utah there's this distinct middle-late Pleistocene based on a home that has health care and that would see in the landscape in our model so what would be the source of that why would you get this pulse and really do some big trouble and the answer is oh that's how time progresses why would you stop so here's that probably on the point the town of Hawaii was seeking about a meter or two thousand and the exposed part not all of it I felt no excuse in that about 45 centimeters 2,000 and so that's why these rates remind me of the East Cache pulse up in Cache and these are both along the wastes maybe not as fast that's some of the places we go so finally and I didn't give you all the lines of evidence but it seems like substance in time has trapped incision in the system but that substance in Moab can see the rate of incision and that all seems to be consistent with the only hypothesis of the business and that is kind of confirming that incision drives it's not necessarily always unloading and uplifting but also by dropping the groundwater table to a solution forming this glass so that's all supporting that and then some of you know we'll be leading a friend to the crisis future to all of these sites and I know some of you guys are coming but the rest of you are routing and crazy thanks for letting me take it while you're telling me do you have any additional questions? no problem so in Moab Valley there are well no in both Spanish Valley and Moab Valley if you think of them as two separate values we are frankly using the published UGS water groundwater storage from just two years ago there are some sweet maps in the back of that that are sort of isopath maps so basically that so to some degree we're using that also James did tried to plumb water well records himself and then a few little published items around the year 2019 but the answer is mostly the assignment data that exists and the gravity data which is much too big just curious are you thinking or have there been any integration of the Dolores and the Paradox Valley oh yeah well no no those are beautiful collapsed anaphyne that's a great idea well I guess well I guess I've driven through the valley and I haven't seen the kind of nice suite of terraces we would need to get stuff at this time still but that's the point as the Dolores has a couple of other of these nice soft grouting maybe there's another place where you could do this sort of stuff and nobody in the family yeah yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah it's your between price and green river there are beautiful places in gravel that you see preserved coming off from the hook cliffs and headed towards the price of living so yeah in fact I have a grad my current grad student is a real good one along the hook cliffs so we're doing the same sort of content but there's no salt in that case but yeah but the quick story is that there are a lot of familiar middle lake places to see in ages for these gravel all around yeah the point is as climate change changes the ultimate base level of sea level is there any chance that those could property that and get through houses I guess the studies that haven't been especially on the Mississippi river where they're able to where they're studying the heck out of the they track how far up-stream and also here studies that have tracked how far up-stream from the sea do you see that high base level change the answer is that usually there's not enough time between racial circumstances for those base level signals to affect rivers more than a few people require so pretty far but we are so far up-streamed and so much higher that there would be a lot of them but if you go down if you go down to either of those they are all about sea level I don't understand well yeah so granted that in that thing one of those normal thoughts along two more I've been along I guess I suppose that they're absolutely they are a salt solution in the sense that I mean there's all this evidence for a substance in that valley there's really rapid rates that cannot be achieved far fewer stresses I think it's not like this problem we know that it is so it has something to do with this localized salt and then I think the thing that we see over and over again in the map in this area with James and along these faults in these study areas is that there are some kind of ancestral life for folks that look like normal normal folks but much of the time to see them talking really to me as a general public it looks more like that often when you see things expanding not bloody and vast so things are expanding and talking about these and so yeah so to me that's consistent literally you just put it in a void in the valley and things will fall rather than take them so yeah so I think this is neat I mean this is sort of falling between the radar these really rapid rates of faulting on that and deformation but it is true right there's no reason there's no reason to expect that these are really hydrogen you know in the way that there's hydrogen so even though we're just starting to get at the rates of slip and there are hazards and more we wouldn't expect to be very much of the current time and that's not going to affect I think I just I've got one point now one thing when we calculate the rate of slip of that fault over a longer time period of 200,000 years the rate is one sixth of that of the energy and so there's a growing picture that had this alarming slip rate from the town hall from the Holocene and when we look over a longer record it is significant in the short term really fast the question was if you weren't able to hear what the other question is as people change and increase groundwater in jobs we've got to affect that feedback and we've got I don't know if you're wondering what the other question is well I guess if you don't mind me there's been a hypothesis but I guess it's still going to be a question that we need to talk to them just now where for certain changes in climate and the over to the length of the storm scale to the subsurface will drive cyclical change and when it's wider in the place of the sea we have more groundwater getting to that salt that used to react and there was a significant variation in the Holocene that's a neat hypothesis but it used to be over there but that reminds me of the the bit of the more water that you actually have I'll put it in the jar I'll put it in the sink I'll put it in the sink I'll put it in so I guess that's intriguing to me as you walk upstream of the Paloano River system I'm suggesting that you get to Westwater and then come upstream that's where you can see and all the patterns and origins we can see so far suggests that if you go up to Greenville which is that desolation is and it is true that the incision rates right below the desolation which I mentioned are really bad for you and then all the indications are that if you go for the head of desolation the plasticine incisions are very slow so that's the signature of desolation hanging within the incision that is this grade of incision put it in the sink that's it that's it don't mess with me that's it