Late Quaternary fluvial environments at Abo Arroyo, New Mexico, U.S.A.: response to millennial-scale climate change

Abstract

Abo Arroyo is a tributary of the Rio Grande in central New Mexico. Its alluvial sequence is made up of four informal units, their age defined by 44 AMS radiocarbon dates from 12.8 ka to 0.85 ka. The earliest, unit 1, is terminal Pleistocene to early Holocene (12.8 ka to 9.0 ka), including the Scholle wet meadow (12.3 ka to 11.1 ka) related to the Younger Dryas. After an erosional gap in the record from 9 ka to 6 ka, coarse gravel (unit 2) was deposited in the channel (5.8 ka and 4.3 ka) during the middle Holocene period of aridity. Subsequently, the late Holocene wet period is characterized by fine-textured alluvium (unit 3) (3.5 ka to 0.945 ka) with shells of an aquatic snail, indicating persistent stream flow. An upper 2-m zone of dark-colored clayey silt beds with high amounts of organic carbon and carbonate accumulated from 1.7 ka to 0.945 ka. A record of C4 signatures, previously interpreted to indicate dry conditions 1.4 ka to 0.945 ka, is reinterpreted as an interval of exceptionally wet floodplain conditions with C4 grasses and sedges. Abo Arroyo and other studies indicate three major episodes of late-Quaternary channel entrenchment: 1) from the full-glacial to late glacial-Bølling/Allerød (6.1 ky), 2) during the middle Holocene (2.5 ky), and 3) during the late Holocene Medieval Warm Period (0.4 ky), each erosional event less severe and shorter duration than the preceding one, and all three represent a significant change from wet to dry climate. During the Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 900 to 1300), a shallow channel formed in unit 3 alluvium, bracketed by AMS dates A.D. 1005 in unit 3 alluvium and A. D. 1100 in unit 4 channel fill. The channel cutting occurred with the shift from wet to dry climate, although the downcutting event was preceded by 100 years of landscape adjustment to the long drought. The canyon fill was entrenched again, deep and wide, by arroyo cutting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The regional 83-year second-century drought (A.D. 100 to A.D. 182), documented by tree rings, shows up in the stable-carbon-isotope record from Abo Arroyo alluvium. The drought was more severe than the 400-year warm period but had little effect on the preserved alluvial record. The less severe but longer-duration Medieval Warm Period resulted in channel cutting at Abo Arroyo and elsewhere in the broad region at that time, but the second-century drought did not. Finally, the similarity of Abo Arroyo and Rio Grande late Holocene alluvial records with parallel stratigraphy, sedimentology, and geochronology illustrates that tributaries and main valleys respond alike and in concert to climate and climate change.