Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 11.12
Depth of staining (
top
) and salt stage for soils (
a
) (Ya) and (
b
) (Yb) the 550 m contour
of Wright Valley (Bockheim et al.
2008
)
visible salts against elevation yielded a very poor adjusted
R
2
of 0.27 (Bockheim
and McLeod
2013
). They argued that lakes of the magnitude and duration proposed
by Hall et al. (
2002
) would have dissolved and redistributed salts in the soils.
11.10
Summary
Cryosols have played an important role in understanding Earth's systems, including
relative dating of soil parent materials, correlating geologic deposits, understand-
ing glacier dynamics, reconstructing past environments, preservation of artefacts
and microorganisms, detecting paleo-human occupation sites, predicting soils and
geomorphic surfaces on extraterrestrial planets such as Mars, and determining
whether or not high level lakes existed during the early Holocene in the McMurdo
Dry Valleys.
