Cosmogenic 10Be Exposure Age Limits on the Angel Lake Glaciation, Ruby Mountains, Northeastern Nevada

Evidence of Pleistocene glaciations in the northern Great Basin of the interior western U.S. has been known for decades. Nonetheless, this area has received considerably less attention than the eastern and western extremes of the Great Basin, despite being centrally located among numerous well-dated Pleistocene glacial chronologies and in a setting where such chronologies can provide clues to the influence of North American ice sheets, Great Basin paleolakes, and atmospheric circulation changes on climate change. Among the most extensively glaciated mountains in the Great Basin are the Ruby and East Humboldt Mountains in northeastern Nevada, where the type localities for the last two Pleistocene glaciations in the region, the Lamoille and Angel Lake Glaciations, are found. The glacial record in these two ranges includes sequences of moraines deposited during the Angel Lake Glaciation, displaying abundant material suitable for terrestrial cosmogenic ¹⁰Be surface-exposure dating. Exposure ages of boulders from atop a sequence of well-preserved moraines in Seitz Canyon in the western Ruby Mountains limit the end of the Angel Lake Glaciation to 19.3 ± 1.0 ka. This preliminary age limit verifies that the Angel Lake Glaciation coincided with marine oxygen-isotope stage 2 and the global Last Glacial Maximum, and suggests that mountain glaciers in northeastern Nevada began retreating in step with the Laurentide Ice Sheet. When compared to glacial chronologies from elsewhere in the region, this age limit indicates an early start of the last deglaciation relative to the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Mountains, at the western and eastern extremes of the Great Basin respectively. Furthermore, this age limit suggests that ice retreat began before the highstands of the largest Great Basin paleolakes, Lakes Bonneville and Lahontan. Further development of the glacial chronology of the northern Great Basin is needed to evaluate the significance of these apparent age differences, and will provide a useful framework for resolving the pattern of climate change during the last glacial-interglacial transition.