Out of the tropics: the Pacific, Great Basin lakes, and late Pleistocene water cycle in the western United States.

The water cycle in the western United States changed dramatically over glacial cycles. In the past 20,000 years, higher precipitation caused desert lakes to form which have since dried out. Higher glacial precipitation has been hypothesized to result from a southward shift of Pacific winter storm tracks.

Collapse of the California Current during glacial maxima linked to climate change on land.

Time series of alkenone unsaturation indices gathered along the California margin reveal large (4 degrees to 8 degrees C) glacial-interglacial changes in sea surface temperature (SST) over the past 550,000 years. Interglacial times with SSTs equal to or exceeding that of the Holocene contain peak abundances in the pollen of redwood, the distinctive component of the temperate rainforest of the northwest coast of California. In the region now dominated by the California Current, SSTs warmed 10,000 to 15,000 years in advance of deglaciation at each of the past five glacial maxima.

Interhemispheric correlation of late pleistocene glacial events.

A radiocarbon chronology shows that piedmont glacier lobes in the Chilean Andes achieved maxima during the last glaciation at 13,900 to 14,890, 21,000, 23,060, 26,940, 29,600, and >/=33,500 carbon-14 years before present ((14)C yr B.P.) in a cold and wet Subantarctic Parkland environment.

Sequence of pumiceous tephra layers and the late quaternary environmental record near mount st. Helens.

Tephra in lake beds within 40 kilometers of Mount St. Helens was deposited an average of once every 2,700 years over the past 35,000 years, for a total of 13 layers. Times of deposition span the period of the Fraser Glaciation and intervals before and after it, and include the series of climates prevailing when vegetation west of the Cascade Range shifted between a park-tundra type and the modern western hemlock forest.

Direct marine-continental correlation: 150,000-year oxygen isotope--pollen record from the north pacific.

Core Y72 II I (43 degrees 15'N, 126 degrees 22'W) contains sediment of oxygen isotope stages I through 6 (substages 5a through 5e are well developed) and abundant pollen from the nearby continent, enabling us for the first time to obtain a direct marine-continental correlation of events in the last interglacial sensu lato. From stage 6 to substage 5e the vegetational record resembles that during the waning of the last glacial. During substage 5e, after a rapid increase of alder, western hemlock was abundant and significant amounts of redwood, oak, and Douglas fir appeared.