Ph.D. candidate Cody Mason and I spent the past week out at his research area in Panamint Valley, California. This was the final field data and sample collection trip for this project (at least on this grant). There’s still much to do on the project, but field work is done!

January in the greater Death Valley region is a lovely time of year for field work — not too hot and very few gnats to contend with. Here are some photos with the caption that describes the image below the photo:

Standing on an alluvial fan looking west toward the basin (Panamint Valley). Note the bar and swale morphology.

View of the Panamint Valley playa (which actually had some water in it) from a canyon incised into the outcropping Pleistocene deposits we are studying.

The research we are doing requires good age control, which is notoriously difficult to get in alluvial deposits. The main goal of this trip was to collect samples for optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. Here’s Cody hammering the sampling tube into the sediment.

A view of the Panamint Mountains in the late afternoon sun light. The lower hills in the middle ground is the proximal part of the now-exhumed alluvial/lacustrine deposits we are characterizing.

Geologist, educator, and GigaPanner extraordinaire Ron Schott was kind enough to meet up with us one afternoon to shoot a few GigaPan images of the field site. The photo above shows the GigaPan rig doing it’s thing. There are three GigaPans, from three locations in the playa: Position #1, Position #2, and Position #3. Cody and I will be using these images to help with facies correlations across the outcrop.

There was actually standing water down in the playa and one morning it was so still we had to stop and appreciate the reflections.

Although these sedimentary deposits are geologically young (<1 Ma) they are cemented and indurated enough to erode into vertical cliffs. Here, we took a quick detour into a very narrow slot canyon.

The focus of our work here is the ~0.2 to 1.5 Ma old deposits but we spent a day exploring the younger (<0.15 Ma) deposits associated with more recent lake highstands. These deposits sit atop the outcrops we’ve been studying in small and sparse outcrops. Above you can see a roadcut exposure behind Cody.

These exposures of the younger sediments may not be extensive but they are quite interesting. Here are some dipping laminated sands interbedded with granule-pebble conglomerate truncated by flatter-lying pebble-cobble conglomerate beds. The Jake staff in the upper right is 1.5 m tall. We interpret the lower dipping beds to have been deposited on steeply dipping foresets of a fan delta building out into the lake.