“Deep history of drylands - how the arid past informs the future”
The 2024 AMQUA is going to be especially great because part of the hosting team (Larry Coats, Mitch Power, and Andrea Brunelle) attended their first AMQUA when it was in Flagstaff in 1996 when they were all masters students in the Quaternary Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. We now have graduates and students of our own who will be participating and we are excited to have all our mentors and colleagues and their students join us for this celebration of “generations” of AMQUA scholars. We feel like we are getting the band back together and really hope to reunite old friends, make new ones, and provide networking opportunities for the new crop of Quaternary scientists all while hanging out in Lake Bonneville.
Salt Lake City is the largest city in Utah, with a population of over 1 million people. We are surrounded by geological features and landscapes that are of great interest to Quaternary scientists. We are situated in the Bonneville Basin, previously the locale of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, and many prominent features of that episode remain today, including the Bonneville Salt Flats, Bonneville and Provo benches, Stockton Bar, and numerous others. In additions, glacial landscapes in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains provide ample evidence of the largest glaciers in Utah during the Last Glacial Maximum. The city houses the University of Utah and the State Capital, providing world-class dining, cultural, and recreational opportunities. The University and the Utah Museum of Natural History house a very active Quaternary science community, with state-of-the-art laboratory facilities in the University of Utah Records of Environment and Disturbance (RED Lab) and the Power Lab at UMNH. We look forward to welcoming the AMQUA community to Salt Lake City!
Meeting at a Glance
- AMQUA Biennial Meeting: August 7-11, 2024
- Abstract and Registration Opens: April 15, 2024
- Student Travel Grant deadline: June 1, 2024
- Abstract deadline: July 1, 2024
- Early Registration deadline: June 15, 2024
- Field Trip deadline: July 1, 2024
- Hotel reservation deadline: July 8, 2024
- Student Travel Grant notification: July 8, 2024
- T-shirt order due: June 15, 2024
- Final Registration deadline: July 1, 2024
- Pre-meeting field trip: August 7, 2024 1-3 pm
- Natural History of Museum and Power Lab tour
- Post-meeting field trip: August 11, 2024
- Field Trip: The history of Lake Bonneville and the waterfront properties of the ancient desert cultures
Post-Meeting Field Trip to the Bonneville Basin
The Bonneville Basin- From the Deep Past to the Motorized Present
On this field trip you will visit both sites of significance to the most ancient inhabitants of the Bonneville Basin, and the surface on which modern land-speed records are set. We will tour Danger Cave, near Wendover, Utah/Nevada to view deeply stratified archaeological deposits that record human activities from 10,000 years ago, when the last stages of Lake Bonneville still stood at the Gilbert shoreline. While visiting the cave, we will also visit the Jukebox Trench, where several meters of Lake Bonneville are revealed in the trench walls, including a thin layer of Mazama Ash, from the eruption of Mount Mazama 7,700 years ago, as well as laminated sediments recording seasonal changes in the waning days of the pluvial lake. From there we will travel south to Blue Lake, for a view of what the spring-fed environments surrounding Lake Bonneville once resembled, with time to take a dip in the geothermal freshwater spring to cool off. From there we will travel to the Bonneville Salt Flats to learn about recent research on the dwindling salt supply that is impacting trials for land-speed records. Finally, we will conclude with a visit to Lakeside Cave on Stansbury Island, another ancient occupation site to learn about it and other nearby caves archiving millennia of human activities in the Bonneville Basin.
Post-Meeting Field Trip to the Bonneville Basin
The Bonneville Basin- From the Deep Past to the Motorized Present
On this field trip you will visit both sites of significance to the most ancient inhabitants of the Bonneville Basin, and the surface on which modern land-speed records are set. We will tour Danger Cave, near Wendover, Utah/Nevada to view deeply stratified archaeological deposits that record human activities from 10,000 years ago, when the last stages of Lake Bonneville still stood at the Gilbert shoreline. While visiting the cave, we will also visit the Jukebox Trench, where several meters of Lake Bonneville are revealed in the trench walls, including a thin layer of Mazama Ash, from the eruption of Mount Mazama 7,700 years ago, as well as laminated sediments recording seasonal changes in the waning days of the pluvial lake. From there we will travel south to Blue Lake, for a view of what the spring-fed environments surrounding Lake Bonneville once resembled, with time to take a dip in the geothermal freshwater spring to cool off. From there we will travel to the Bonneville Salt Flats to learn about recent research on the dwindling salt supply that is impacting trials for land-speed records. Finally, we will conclude with a visit to Lakeside Cave on Stansbury Island, another ancient occupation site to learn about it and other nearby caves archiving millennia of human activities in the Bonneville Basin.
The American Quaternary Association
The American Quaternary Association(AMQUA) is a professional organization of North American scientists devoted to studying all aspects of the Quaternary Period, about the last 2.6 million years of Earth history. Studying the Quaternary is critically important because it has been a time of frequent and dramatic environmental changes, exemplified by growing and decaying continental ice sheets and mountain glaciers. Beyond understanding the forces that shaped our modern environment, studying the Quaternary Period is significant because the environmental changes accompanying past ice ages were the backdrop for global changes in floral and faunal communities, including extinction of a diverse megafauna, and for the evolution of modern humans and their dispersal throughout the world.
AMQUA was founded in 1970 primarily to foster cooperation and communication among
the remarkably broad array of disciplines involved in studying the Quaternary Period.
Major activities include a biennial meeting, professional awards, partnership with
INQUA (the International Quaternary Association), and the Quaternary Times newsletter.
Local Organizing Committee
Andrea Brunelle
Larry Coats
Mitch Power
Simon Brewer
Meeting and Program Advisory Committee
Jesse Morris
Jenn Watt
Lisbeth Louderback
Zach Lundeen
Rick Forster
Summer Rupper
Shannon Boomgarden
Brian Codding
Husile Bai
Ken Petersen
Gabe Bowen
Thank you to the following for their support and contributions to 2024 AMQUA
Department of Geography, University of Utah
College of Social and Behavioral Science, University of Utah
Andrew DeQuiroz & Gaven Neufeld, University of Utah
Natural History Museum of Utah
We thank the American Quaternary Association for the funding of student travel and
sponsoring invited speakers.
Student AMQUA members who are presenting at the 2024 AMQUA Biennial Meeting may apply for travel grants. A limited number of grants will be available to cover the meeting registration ($350) for students. Deadline for travel grant application is June 1, 2024. Please send a letter requesting a travel award and a research presentation abstract to: Dr. Colin Long via email; longco@uwosh.edu to be considered. Important: You must be an AMQUA member to be eligible, Awards will be announced by June 10, 2024 with meeting registration notification to follow.