Title:
Geophysical Surveys of Bear Lake, Utah-Idaho, September 2002 - JPEG Images of Sound Velocity Profiles
Abstract:
Bear Lake is a tectonic lake that has existed for at
least several hundred thousand years. The lake basin
is a relatively simple half graben, a spoon-shaped depression
tilted toward the main fault on the east side of the lake. The U.S.
Geological Survey, in cooperation with researchers from several
universities, has been studying the sediments of Bear Lake since
1996. The general purpose of this effort is to reconstruct past
limnological conditions and regional climate on a range of timescales,
from hundreds of years to hundreds of thousands of years. This research
relates to a variety of human concerns, including water usage in
the Bear River basin. Past work has included several coring operations,
a seismic-reflection survey, sediment-trap deployments, a barge-mounted
drilling operation with the GLAD800 drill rig, and a variety of
other studies.
The objectives of the September, 2002 operations, preliminarily
reported here, were (1) to compile a detailed bathymetric map of
the lake using swath-mapping techniques, in order to provide baseline
data for a variety of applications and studies, and (2) to complete
a sidescan-sonar survey of the lake, providing a nearly complete
acoustic image of the lake floor. Limited amounts of subbottom acoustic-reflection
data (CHIRP) were also collected, along with samples of lake-floor
sediments representative of different kinds of backscatter patterns.
These surveys followed an earlier subbottom acoustic-reflection
survey (1997), using boomer and 3.5 kHz systems (S. M. Colman, unpublished
data).
