Has Buchheim published anything on Lake Gosuite that I
>am unaware of?
Art replied
>>You may not have seen his paper (Buchheim and Surdam) in J. Gray, A. J.
Boucot and W. B. N. Berry's (eds) book: Communities of the Past (1981,
Hutchison & Ross), "Paleoenvironments and Fossil Fish in the Laney Member
(lake Gosiute) Green River Formation, Wyoming" In this paper, Buchheim
shows the siliciclastic ratio in laminae near the center of the Lake
Gosiute Basin is actually as high as or higher than that in the laminae of
Fossil Lake Basin.<<
I finally got the book. Help me Art,
Buchheim and Surdam write of the deep lake (limnetic) vs the lake shore (littoral):
"Carbonate content averages over 60 percent (X-ray diffraction data) and organic content about 8 percent (weight), particularly in the lower 10 m of the Laney Member. Laminated rocks in areas interpreted as litoral usually contain less than 40 percent carbonate minerals and less than 5 percent organic carbon. This relationship is probably due to the siliciclastics being filtered out in the littoral zone by vegetation and/or settling out before reaching the open waters of the limnetic environment." p. 435
This is the only place I see them actually talking about the mineralogy. This paper doesn't discuss or have data from Fossil Lake, so I presume that mineralogic data is in another paper and i would like to find it. Under the assumption that the the rest of the mass is made up of siliciclastics, I have two questions
Are Buchheim and Surdam using the litoral figure or the limnetic figure to compare to Fossil lake? Where is the data?
Considering that in Gosuite the carbonate goes up and siliciclastic goes down as one moves from the lake shore to the deep, distal part of the lake does this not then explain why in fossil Lake, Buchheims should find more siliciclastics? Fossil Lake being smaller never had a really distal region of the as did Gosuite. Thus the fact that there are more laminae at the edge of Fossil lake than there are in the center of Fossil lake becomes irrelevant to the laminae 100 miles from the shore of Gosuite. (Gosuite is about 200 miles in diameter (from memory) and Fossil lake is about 16) Storm laminae wouldn't make it that far.