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Full-Text Articles in Paleobiology

Paleo-Environmental Change In Deer Lagoon, Whidbey Island Interpreted From Diatoms And Lithology, Lourdes Garcia Jan 2026

Paleo-Environmental Change In Deer Lagoon, Whidbey Island Interpreted From Diatoms And Lithology, Lourdes Garcia

All Master's Theses

Puget Sound is a densely populated, tectonically active area that can be affected by earthquakes from local crustal faults and the Cascadia subduction zone capable of producing abrupt coseismic subsidence. Tidal wetlands are particularly sensitive to abrupt changes because they are depositional environments that reside at sea-level and their lithology and ecological communities are strongly controlled by elevation within the tidal frame. As a result, coseismic subsidence can disrupt established environmental gradients and leave distinguishable signatures preserved within the stratigraphy, like tidal mud directly over peat deposits. These preserved records provide an opportunity to reconstruct past earthquakes and associated relative …


Two Post-Glacial Sagebrush Steppe Fire Records At The Wildland-Urban Interface, Eastern Cascades, Washington, Dusty Pilkington Jan 2018

Two Post-Glacial Sagebrush Steppe Fire Records At The Wildland-Urban Interface, Eastern Cascades, Washington, Dusty Pilkington

All Master's Theses

Recent increases in large fires in the rapidly developing wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas of central Washington, where development intermixes with wildland fuels, contribute to federal firefighting costs exceeding of $1 billion annually. In addition, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) invasion and anthropogenic-caused warming shorten fire return intervals while lengthening fire seasons. These climatic, ecological, economic, and social factors combine with fuel accumulation resulting from historic fire suppression to threaten lives and property in the WUI. To plan for safe growth in WUI areas, long-term fire histories are needed to expand understanding of past fire regimes in an understudied ecosystem, sagebrush …


Tertiary Coniferous Woods Of Western North America, George F. Beck Aug 1945

Tertiary Coniferous Woods Of Western North America, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Almost four decades have elapsed since Platen (1908), the German paleobotanist, published his report upon the fossil woods of the western United States. Since then no over-all treatment of these materials has been attempted. although Platen overlooked the Pacific Northwest with its abundance of Tertiary petrified woods. The purpose of this paper is to bring knowledge of the western coniferous woods of the Tertiary up to date. In this effort the writer recognizes that much of this information has been accumulated incidentally in the study of the Russell Petrified Forest series of central Washington, and that it is not as …


Nyssa Woods Of The Pacific-Northwest Tertiary, George F. Beck Feb 1945

Nyssa Woods Of The Pacific-Northwest Tertiary, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

The nyssa gums are one of the modern genera of trees most certainly present among the petrified woods and forests of the Pacific Northwest. Almost every collection from the mid-Tertiary of this region contains a few specimens of typical tupelo or sour gum. These are fine-grained woods which to the unaided eye may be mistaken for conifers.


Ancient Maples Of The Central Washington Region, George F. Beck Nov 1944

Ancient Maples Of The Central Washington Region, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

When I began work on the petrified logs of the general Vantage area some 13 years ago, it became apparent at once that maple-like woods are commonplace in the main (Vantage) raft forest and slightly less abundant in two rooted units of the Yakima Canyon. So widely do these woods range throughout the structural variations found in modern maples that little success has attended the efforts to assign them to nominal species. The extremes can readily be established but few hints exist as to the boundaries between them.


Two Newly Discovered Conifers, George F. Beck Apr 1944

Two Newly Discovered Conifers, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Two genera of coniferous wood, apparently not listed among the Tertiary woods of the western states, have been recognized in the Percy Train collections from Rainbow Ridge, northwestern Nevada. These two, Tsuga (hemlock) and Chamaecyparis (cedar) bring up to 14 the genera of coniferous wood more or less certainly identified from the period and area in question.


Status Of Tertiary Woods Of The Western States Representing The Juglandaceae, George F. Beck Apr 1944

Status Of Tertiary Woods Of The Western States Representing The Juglandaceae, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

For many years there has been uncertainty concerning the generic status of some fossil leaves belonging without question to the walnut family as a whole. A review of the woods of Juglandaceae as they have appeared in Tertiary horizons of the western states has suggested which genera are present, and in what proportions their leaves (or other remains) might be expected to appear.


Spruce In The Western Miocene, George F. Beck Nov 1936

Spruce In The Western Miocene, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

One of the real surprises in store for us as we began to section specimens of petrified wood from the Vantage and certain other horizons in Central Washington, was the prevalence of a spruce type hardly hinted at in the leaf lists as published for the various sediments of Yakima time (upper miocene?).


Exotic Ancient Forests Of Washington, George F. Beck Apr 1935

Exotic Ancient Forests Of Washington, George F. Beck

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

The greatest fossil forest in the world is located within easy driving distance of the University of Washington campus in the State of Washington, near the Columbia River, east of the city of Ellensburg. Mr. George F. Beck, a member of the faculty of the Ellensburg State Normal School, and a former graduate student of the College of Forestry of the University of Washington, discovered this forest, which is now known as the Ginkgo Forest State Park. Aside from its importance from a scientific point of view, this "petrified forest," which contains a greater variety of species than any other …