Taylor CreekBy Ruben Z Raya

Professor Lawler

GEOLOGY 103

Content• Notes

• Historical Background

• Geological Background

• Taylor Creek Geology and Evolution

• Taylor Creek Flora

• Taylor Creek Fauna

• Conclusion

• Works Cited

Taylor Creek

Notes • This study was done during

June 2013.

• Unless it is indicated, all pictures shown here belong to the author.

• The maps were obtained from Google Maps.

• Special thanks to the people of the Forest Service and the authorities of Lake Tahoe that keep this area well preserved for future generations to enjoy.

Taylor Creek 2013

Taylor Creek Bridge

Swamp area

Historical BackgroundThe Washoe people lived there for

over 10,000 years and prior to them the Clovis people were there . They did hunting and fishing in the area for many years. (Lanman, 2012).

• Taylor Creek is probably named for Elijah W. Taylor, who homesteaded 160 acres near the creek in 1864 (Lekisch, 1988).

Marsh and meadow

Taylor Creek Geology• A Creek is stream, brook, or

minor tributary of a river (Langbein, 1995).

• Taylor Creek is a 2.2 mile long flowing stream originating in the Fallen Leaf Lake and culminating at Baldwin Beach at Lake Tahoe in El Dorado County, California (Lekisch 1988).

• Taylor Creek is the only outflow for Fallen Leaf Lake, and begins at a spillway on the Fallen Leaf Lake dam on the north side of the lake. From here it winds its way northwards, entering the Tallac & Taylor Creek wetland before entering Lake Tahoe ( Lekisch, 1988).

Elevation 6,237 ft (1,901 m)GPS: 38º55'56.95"N, 120º3'27.61"WObtained from Google Maps.

Taylor Creek in El Dorado County

Evolution of the Creek

• Taylor Creek Run-off

Taylor Creek begun by the movement of glaciers 25 million years ago during the Cenozoic Era, while the uplifting formed the Sierra Nevada. Glaciers scraped off surface layers of soil and rock as they grew and advanced across the area, and when they retreated, they left behind low-lying areas where these materials have been removed. Water drains, or 'runs off', to this area under the force of gravity and pools put pressure to the longer stretches of low land, water flows along, again under the force of gravity, until it was able to escape to Lake Tahoe. Thus, Taylor creek was the result of time and pressure (Hamilton, 1997).

Taylor Creek Geology

• Glaciations gave shape to Taylor Creek, but prior to the glaciations data indicates that the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe was ~2800 m high at the time, consistent with early (Late Cretaceous–early Cenozoic) uplift. The tuffs erupted from calderas in central Nevada and flowed down an extensive paleoriver system that drained to the Pacific Ocean, which was in the Great Valley at the time, but 450 million years ago during the Ordovician, a major mountain-building episode was the Taconic orogeny that was well under way in Cambrian times. In the beginning of the Late Ordovician, from 460 to 450 Ma, volcanoes along the margin of the Iapetus Ocean spewed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, turning the planet into a hothouse. These volcanic island arcs eventually collided with proto North America to form the Appalachian mountains. By the end of the Late Ordovician these volcanic emissions had stopped. Gondwana had by that time neared or approached the pole and was largely glaciated.

(Stanley, 1998)

450 million years ago

Granite rock

• Gray granite

• This specimen that I found was very common along the Taylor Creek. This gray Granite rock is a common type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock which is a granular and phaneriticin texture. This rock consist mainly of quartz, mica, and feldspar (Clements, 1988).

• Granite is an igneous rock and it is form from magma. Granitoids are a ubiquitous component of the crust. They have crystallized from magmas. Mt Pluto was probably the source of magma that form this rock (Clements, 1988).

Sedimentary rock

• Specimen found: A Clastic Siltstone, and it is made of sediment that is between sand and clay and it's finer grained than sandstone but coarser than shale.

• The field test for siltstone is that you can't see the individual grains, but you can feel them. Many geologists rub their teeth against the stone to detect the fine grit of silt. Siltstone is much less common than sandstone or shale.

• Siltstone usually forms offshore, in quieter environments than the places that make sandstone. (King, 2001)

This rock is also common along the creek, it is a sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rocks are types of rock that are formed by the deposition of material at the Earth's surface and within bodies of water. Sedimentation is the collective name for processes that cause mineral and/or organic particles to settle and accumulate or minerals to precipitate from a solution over time. Particles that form a sedimentary rock by accumulating are called sediment before being deposited, sediment was formed by weathering and erosion in a source area, and then transported to the place of deposition by water, ice, wind, movements or glaciers which are called agents of denudation. (Stanley, 1999)

Flora

• Pinus jeffreyi : Pinus evolved in middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in the middle Mesozoic. By the late Cretaceous pines had spread east and west throughout Laurasia, attaining high diversity in eastern Asia, the eastern United States, and western Europe, but having little representation at high northern latitudes. Changing climates in the early Tertiary established warm and humid tropical/subtropical conditions in a broad zone to 70°N throughout middle latitudes. Pines and their relatives disappeared from many middle-latitude areas during this time and were replaced by diverse angiosperm taxa of the boreotropical flora, which were adapted to the equable, tropical climate. The effect of this climate change and spread of boreotropical flora was to displace pines from their former habitats. A hypothesis is defended that pines shifted, during the three warm periods of the Eocene, into three major refugial areas in the Northern Hemisphere: high latitudes, low latitudes, and upland regions of middle latitudes (Miller, 1993).

• Jeffrey Pines, Pinus jeffreyi, dominate the forest in the area, they thrive during the dry summers, absorb the snow moisture and hardy stand the toughest winters.

Jeffrey pine is a large, slow-growing, long-lived conifer. Trees often live 400 or 500 years. In Jeffrey pine/huckleberry oak vegetation in central Sierra Nevada, Jeffrey pine may reach 200 feet diameters of up to 8.2 feet. Crowns are rounded or long and symmetrical. Pinus is an ancient genus, diverging from other extant genera at least 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous (Alvin,1960).

FAUNA• Taylor Creek forms an important

wetland complex separate from Lake Tahoe by Baldwin Beach. Historically, this wetland complex provided approximately 200 acres of wetland and meadow habitat for many species.

• (Taylor Creek, USFS, 2003).

• There are fish, insects, birds, bears, frogs, moles, ducks living there. I am going to share only pictures and information of the species that I saw.

• Many aquatic insects are adapted to living in creeks and have flattened bodies so that they can move over rocks without getting swept away. They mainly eat algae and other material that clings to those rocks like this crayfish.

• (Taylor Creek, USFS, 2003).

Duck and meadow

Crayfish

Paranephrops Planifrons

Scientific Classification Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Arthopoda Subphylum: Crustacea Class: Malacostraca Order: Decapoda Suborder: Pleocyemata Infraorder: Astacidea Superfamily: Astacoidea(Huxley, 1879)

Crayfish are the freshwater cousins of the lobsters. Fossils have shown that crayfish were present in the Northern Hemisphere at least 150 million years ago. An ancestor of crayfish first evolved very early, when all of Earth's continents were united in a single landmass called Pangaea.

The fossil dates are consistent with results

of recent genetic studies, which suggest that many new crayfish species began to appear in what is now Australia about 134 million years ago."These crayfish were burrowing much like modern ones in the same area today, showing that their behaviors haven't changed that much in more than 100 million years." (Johnson, 2008).

BeaverBeaver (Castor canadensis)

Beaver tree work

The Giant Beaver, Castoroides (Field Museum of Natural History)

Beavers are the second largest rodents, first appear in the fossil record about 65 million years ago, around the time when the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. The ancestors of today's beavers and their relatives appear in the fossil record near the end of the Eocene. Ancient beavers include creatures such as Castoroides.

Scientific classification

Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: ChordataClass: MammaliaOrder: RodentiaFamily: CastoridaeGenus: CastorSpecies: C. canadensis

Caffrey, P. and Anderson, S. H. (2001)

Caffrey, P. and Anderson, S. H. (2001)

Salmon

The Salmon living in this creek is the Oncorhynchus nerka, and it is not native of Taylor Creek.

Salmon. Photo by Mark Giovanetti

Scientific Classification

Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: ActinopterygiiSubclass:Neopterygii Infraclass: Teleostei Order: Salmoniformes Family: Salmonidae Genus: Oncorhynchus Species: O. nerka

Both the fossil record and molecular data indicate that the genera Salmo and Onchorhynchus had diverged by the early Miocene (15–20 MA), (Devlin, 1993)

Fauna HabitatBecause streams are used as corridors by many small mammals, birds of prey such as owls can be found waiting for their moment to strike. Small insect-eating birds are numerous here.

Many birds feed on fish in creeks or on aquatic insects as they emerge (Devlin, 1993)

Marsh and forest meet

Stream

Conclusion

• A complete Ecosystem

• Taylor Creek is formed by the forest, meadows, marsh, stream, lagoon and sand beach. Each piece is a community of living things and their surroundings, and each piece contains many habitats of individual plants and animals. It takes all the pieces to ensure that clean water is delivered to Lake Tahoe. The Taylor Creek watershed collects snow and rain and drains it to the Lake. Changing one piece means changing the whole picture

(Taylor-Tallac restoration report, US Forest Service,

2011).

Works Cited

• * Harvey Blatt and Robert J. Tracy (1997). Petrology (2nd ed.). New York: Freeman. p. 66• *James, C. D., Lanman, R. B. (Spring, 2012). "Novel physical evidence that beaver historically were native to the

Sierra Nevada". California Fish and Game 98 (2): 129–132.• *Marcia Williamson (Oct. 1992). “Tahoe Salmon life”. Sunset Magazine. Retrieved• *Naslas, G. D., W. W. Miller, R. R. Blank and G. F. Gifford, 1994. Sediment, nitrate, and ammonium in surface

runoff from two Tahoe basin soil types. Water Resour. Bull. 30: 409–417. • *R. B. Lanman, H. Perryman, B. Dolman, Charles D. James (Spring, 2012). "The historical range of beaver in the

Sierra Nevada: a review of the evidence". California Fish and Game 98 (2): 65–80.• *U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. Tahoe Map, accessed

September 30, 2012.• *Washoe Project, University of Chicago. Retrieved 2012-09-30.