18 years of flood-wrought change, Verde River, AZ
This series of photos documents changes that have occurred in a
tributary-mouth slackwater deposit site along the lower Verde River,
Arizona. It begins in 1992 and includes images from 1996, 1997,
1998(2), 1999, 2000, 2005, and 2010. The series includes several large
floods down the Verde as well as a couple of floods down the
tributary. Sadly, I don't have a roughly matching photo directly
following the record flood of 145,000 cfs that buried this site in
sediment in 1993.
in excess of 1500 years for the Verde River. The transformations that
this terrace has undergone in the last 18 years, however, supports the
assertion that most (all?) Holocene fluvial paleoflood records are
inevitably incomplete. Note how inset terraces come and go. We busted our butts getting down to this site last Tuesday...not a
trivial drive after a large flood...and grabbed some data, some
photos, and some new incentive to finally finish our manuscript about
the flood history of the river. We do have a publication about this site already: House, P.K., Pearthree, P.A., and Klawon, J.E., Historical flood and
paleoflood chronology of the lower Verde River, Arizona: Stratigraphic
evidence and related uncertainties, in Ancient Floods, Modern Hazards:
Principles and Applications of Paleoflood Hydrology. AGU Water Science
and Application Volume 5. https://www.agu.org/pubs/booksales/books/HYWS0053541.html
