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Episodes 2025; 48(1): 51-63

Published online March 1, 2025

https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2024/024015

Copyright © International Union of Geological Sciences.

New 10Be-26Al isochron burial dating informs the Pliocene and Pleistocene evolution of the lower Colorado River, southwestern United States

Yeong Bae Seong1*, Ryan Crow2, P. Kyle House2, Keith Howard3, Cho-Hee Lee1, Byong Yong Yu4

1 Department of Geography, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Republic of Korea
2 U.S. Geological Survey, 2255 North Gemini Road, Flagstaff, Arizona 86001, USA
3 U.S. Geological Survey, 350 N. Akron Rd. P.O. Box 158 Moffett Field, CA 94035
4 AMS Laboratory, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, Republic of Korea

Correspondence to:*E-mail: ybseong@korea.ac.kr

Received: December 7, 2023; Revised: June 13, 2024; Accepted: June 13, 2024

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Four new 10Be-26Al isochron burial ages ranging from 4.4 to 2 Ma on ancestral Colorado River deposits in the lower Colorado River corridor (LCRC) help constrain the river’s evolution during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene. They help fill a gap between previous work that focused on older and younger deposits: Older dated deposits include the 5 Ma Bouse Formation, which records the integration of the Colorado River through a series of preexisting basins to the Gulf of California and the ca. 4.5 - 3.5 Ma Bullhead Alluvium, a 200 to 300 m thick aggregational package that immediately followed integration. The much younger, 100 - 70 ka, Chemehuevi Formation is another major aggradation package mapped throughout the LCRC. The new burial ages on the facies of Santa Fe Railway (4.37 ± 0.71 Ma), boulder conglomerate of Bat Cave Wash (2.12 ± 0.26 and 2.05 ± 0.31 Ma), and the Palo Verde alluvium (3.03 ± 0.26 Ma) partially fill in a 3.5 M.y. gap between the deposition of the Bullhead Alluvium and the Chemeheuvi Formation and document the timescales over which the Colorado River was able to remove the Bullhead aggradational package and initiate newer and smaller aggradational pulses.