The History of the Stockton Bar, Lake Bonneville, Utah

Keywords: Lake Bonneville, the Stockton Bar, G.K. Gilbert, geoheritage
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 22

Abstract

The Great Bar at Stockton, Utah, is a massive baymouth barrier at a barrier-spit complex created between Tooele and Rush Valleys during the highest (Bonneville) stand of late Pleistocene Lake Bonneville from about 15,000 to 14,500 radiocarbon years before present. The impressive suite of landforms is scientifically important contributing to the understanding of such topics as climate change, isostasy, plate tectonics, and lacustrine processes. The shoreline was abandoned at the time of the Bonneville Flood, which lowered the paleolake’s outlet by about 130 m, thus ensuring that the lake would never reoccupy the elevation of these landforms.
G.K. Gilbert detailed scientific evidence and explanations that he derived from the bar in his 1890 Lake Bonneville monograph. He visited and named the bar in 1877 and conducted extensive fieldwork there in 1880, but he knew about the bar, and likely had seen it, as early as 1872. Beckwith’s (1855) Pacific Railroad Survey report on field explorations in 1854 appears to be the first scientifically oriented account to mention outstanding shoreline features at the Stockton Bar locality.
The Stockton Bar existed for almost 14,500 years before the town of Stockton was established adjacent to it in 1862. Since then, an ever-increasing and encroaching population has built roads, a highway, and utility lines across the coastal complex; cut through the bar for a railroad; mined significant quantities of its gravel and sand for the construction industry; and more. Efforts to preserve this important geoheritage site have had little success thus far.