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E-Mail IMAGE: A schematic of what the authors think the landscape and human activity was like over the last 1,200 years in the Fish Lake Plateau region. A) 1,200 to 500 years. view more Credit: S. Yoshi Maezumi If you were to visit the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau a thousand years ago, you d find conditions remarkably familiar to the present. The climate was warm, but drier than today. There were large populations of Indigenous people known as the Fremont, a who hunted and grew crops in the area. With similar climate and moderate human activity, you might expect to see the types of wildfires that are now common to the American West: infrequent, gigantic and devastating. But you d be wrong. ....
Advertisement: The paleohistory that his team analyzed in the stalagmites that formed in Leviathan cover nearly the same time frame that humans first started using Danger Cave, which is now considered one of the Great Basin’s most important human history sites. The stalagmites are created by the slow buildup of calcium carbonate layers as water droplets fall from the cave ceiling. They offer a “readable” record, much like the tree ring records that are a staple of climate science. “We’re able to date those layers using chemistry rather than actually counting them like they do in a tree ring,” Lachniet said. “We measure the concentration of uranium naturally occurring in the calcite, and that tells us how old the stalagmite is.” ....
Earlier climate change had life-changing effects on the ancient people who stayed in Danger Cave. Fresh water that supported fish and abundant wildlife dried up and left inhabitants with the labor-intensive chore of extracting tiny seeds form pickle weed and other drought-hardy plants, the archaeological record shows. Of course, in the past, there were a lot less people in the West needing less of finite water supply. Photo by Judy Fahys/InsideClimate News EDITOR S NOTE:
Mountain Journal is a content-sharing partner with InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that provides essential reporting and analysis on climate, energy and the environment. ....
4:39 Climate change had life-changing effects on the ancient people who stayed in Danger Cave. Freshwater that supported fish and abundant wildlife dried up and left inhabitants with the labor-intensive chore of extracting tiny seeds from pickleweed and other drought-hardy plants, the archaeological record shows. Credit Judy Fahys/InsideClimate News The ancient people of western Utah’s Danger Cave lived well. They ate freshwater fish, ducks and other small game, according to detritus they left behind. They had a lush lakeside view, with cattails, bulrushes and water-loving willows adorning the marshlands. But, over time, the good life became history. As heat and drought set in, the freshwater dried up and forced the ancients to survive by plucking tiny seeds from desert shrubs called pickleweed. Archaeologists know this from a thick layer of dusty chaff buried in the cave’s floor. ....