Rock varnish evidence for latest Pleistocene millennial-scale wet events in the drylands of western United States

Abstract

Rock varnish from late to latest Pleistocene geomorphic features in the drylands of the western U.S. provides evidence of nine millennial-scale wet events from 11,500–18,000 calendar yr B.P., represented by regionally replicable and approximately evenly spaced manganese- and barium-rich dark bands in varnish microstratigraphy. Preliminary radiometric age calibration indicates that these events appear to be broadly coeval with millennial-scale cooling events identified in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core record. Six of these wet events are associated with the cold intervals of the Younger Dryas and Heinrich event H1, and the other three with the short-lived cooling phases of the Intra-Allerød Cold Period, the Older Dryas, and the Oldest Dryas. These results, combined with our previous documentation of millennial-scale wet events in the Holocene varnish record for the same region, indicate that such wet oscillations in the western U.S. may be parts of regionally widespread manifestation of well-documented, pervasive millennial-scale cycles of the North Atlantic climate.