A serious map...with (surprise!) a dry desert lake

Yet another map for 2009...don't get too excited, though. I won't
subject you to my rant about how I get surprisingly little credit for
these gargantuan efforts until they are subjected to an external
review...that is for another day. Trust me, it will come. Probably in
mid January.

In any case, this new map includes a snippet of surficial mapping that
I and others did a few years ago in the entirety of Ivanpah Valley,
Nevada...'The Ivanpaviathan' with some minor changes.

The big story here is the huge amount of work that the first author
did in creating the bedrock mapping. This is a complicated area to say
the least (heard of the Keystone Thrust and its ilk?). Larry did a
fair amount of new mapping, but really went the extra mile in
compiling diverse scraps and swaths of mapping created over the years
by the other authors. No small task.

Now, about that missing cross section...

Yet another map...and another vanished desert lake.

More on the lake in the desert theme...here is a recently completed,
yet preliminary, map of the terminus of the Carson River where it once
spewed through an amazingly complicated array of distributary channels
that fed a terminal lake in the Carson Desert. The lake was a mere
puddle relative to its ancestor, Lake Lahontan, but it was still
probably pretty cool. It certainly shrank and swelled enough to drive
the river crazy as it built a plexus of channels while chasing its
fluctuating shores.

The 24k scale of this map makes it hard to appreciate the complexity
of the varying river-lake interface. Maybe someday we will map the
whole thing in similar detail...actually, remap it, since Roger
Morrison covered most of this ground in the 50s and 60s. We are just
tackling it with better imagery and slightly improved stratigraphy.

Link to a legible pdf: http://www.nbmg.unr.edu/dox/of0912.pdf