Tracking dune blowouts to constrain prehistoric droughts in the Nebraska Sand Hills (Great Plains, USA)

Abstract

Droughts are amongst the most significant natural hazards in the central and southern Great Plains (USA). Chronologies of droughts and related dune activity phases in the Great Plains are paramount for understanding the frequency and magnitude of these potential risks. Beyond historical records, the timing and magnitude of droughts can be revealed only from sediment archives. Our joint DFG/SNF project, CONSTRAIN, aims to provide a new, accurate, and precise temporal placement of prehistoric droughts in the Great Plains, specifically the Nebraska Sand Hills, over the last 1,500 years. We combine methodological research (zircon luminescence dating, luminescence screening) with high-resolution quartz OSL dating to better understand the regional landscape dynamics. Our collaboration is currently in a pilot phase, performing the first methodological tests and identifying suitable archives for dating. In our first field season, we sampled sand blowouts in the Nebraska Sand Hills identified from LiDAR data. These widespread crater-like depressions (Stubbendieck et al., 1989) are similar to modern blowouts but are grass-covered, suggesting they are likely prehistoric. Still, they remain poorly studied. The blowouts are deflation hollows that seem unrelated to anthropogenic activity or disturbance through wild animals. Instead, they likely formed from drought events that resulted in aeolian deflation on dune crests, but they were either of lower magnitude or shorter-lived than droughts that reactivated the dunes that last moved between 1,000 to 600 years ago (Mason et al., 2004; Miao et al., 2007; McKean et al., 2015). Our contribution presents field luminescence screening results from 141 samples and the first optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) quartz ages derived from standard measurements testing the hypothesis that the naturally occurring blowouts are related to partial dune reactivation phases between 800 to 200 years ago.