Geology topics

Ray E. Marsell

Publications and source records attributed to Ray E. Marsell.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2014

Great Salt Lake: A selected bibliography with annotations

Explorers began to push into the vast uncharted areas of the West in 1804, when Captains Lewis and Clarke ascended the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains into the headwaters of the Columbia River, and followed that stream to the Pacific Ocean. The honor of being the first white man to see Great Salt Lake is claimed for a number of explorers and trappers who visited the region in the twenties and thirties of the Nineteenth Century. Among these were Etienne Provot and James Bridger, who were in the region in 1824–25, each quite unaware of the other's activities and discoveries. In 1833 Captain B. L. E. Bonneville dispatched a party from his camp at Green River, Wyoming, for the purpose of exploring Great Salt Lake. This party attempted to make a circuit of the lake, chart its outline, and trap all the streams en route, but the attempt was abandoned because the great barren salt plains west of the lake were so hazardous that the party was in grave danger of perishing.

Utah↗

USGS1972

Cloudburst floods in Utah, 1939-69

During 1939-69, 836 cloudburst floods were reported in Utah. The largest number was in 1965, when 88 floods were reported; 63 floods were reported in 1968, and 56 were reported in 1961. The smallest number of floods reported was three in 1944. In 1942, 1948, and 1950, six floods were reported each year. The main source of data was newspaper reports. Cloudburst floods in Utah were experienced in the vicinity of 131 of 228 communities (incorporated communities and those unincorporated places of 1,000 or more population). Floods were also reported in the vicinity of 63 other inhabited places (1,000 or less population), for a total of 194 places that experienced floods. Twenty were reported to have experienced 10 or more cloudburst floods. Since July 1847, when permanent settlement began, Utah has experienced a total of 1,339 recorded cloudburst floods, of which 408 occurred along the Wasatch Front. These figures do not represent the total number o thunderstorms but only those violent enough to produce cloudburst floods. Many other floods that took place in sparsely settled areas have gone unrecorded.

Utah↗

USGS1946

Cloudburst floods in Utah, 1850-1938

Five years after the first settlement was made in Utah, at Salt Lake City in 1847, it became manifest to the settlers both there and at Manti that "cloudbursts" were of common occurrence in this region. Other settlements were made and gradually expanded on the steep alluvial fans of the mountain streams, and reports of cloudburst storms and their attendant floods became increasingly numerous as farms and homes were damaged by them. In 1890 the theory was advanced that these floods occurred because the sheep and cattle had eaten off the vegetation in the hills, leaving nothing to hold the water back. This indictment of man's flocks and herds has become so common that during the past 20 years considerable study has been given to it. Most of the study, however, has been devoted to runoff from the catchment basins and factors involved in its control and little of it to an adequate scientific analysis of the relationship between physiographic and geologic features and the meteorologic phenomena involved in the storms

Utah↗