Megadroughts of the Southwest
Are you concerned about drilling in the Valles Caldera National Preserve? Don't be: researchers there were drilling for scientific core samples, not for oil. A broad collaboration of university and government organizations, representing the U.S., Australia, and the Netherlands, extracted an 82-meter-deep core from the region. The core contains sediment layers that were deposited between 368,000 and 552,000 years ago, within a 2.6-million-year epoch known as the Pleistocene. Included in the data between these bounding years are two distinct interglacial periods—relatively warmer periods that occur between ice ages—which shed some light on the Holocene interglacial in progress today.