The Honey Creek Member: A New Holocene Alluvial Stratigraphic Unit in the Midwest

Authors

Jeremy S. Dillon, University of Nebraska at Kearney
Rolfe D. Mandel, University of Kansas

Document Type

Research

Keywords

Honey Creek Member, Holocene alluvium, DeForest Formation

Abstract

This paper describes the type locality and type section for the Honey Creek Member, a stratigraphic unit first recognized in the Honey Creek drainage in southeastern Nebraska. The alluvial chronology for Honey Creek basin is similar to the regional chronology of streams in the Midwest, and all of the formal members of the DeForest Formation occur in the basin. However, the lithology of one unit, the Honey Creek Member, does not correlate with any of the formally recognized members of the DeForest Formation. The Honey Creek Member is composed of grayish brown silt loam overbank facies coarsening downward to a gravelly loam channel facies with prominent, large-scale cross-bedding. At its type locality, aggradation of the Honey Creek Member occurred from ca. 3700 ¹⁴C yrs. B.P. to ca. 600 ¹⁴C yrs. B.P. Paleochannels preserved within the unit suggest that aggradation was interrupted by at least two episodes of channel entrenchment and filling. The Honey Creek Member is significant because it has been identified within many basins across the eastern Plains. Recognition and detailed mapping of this unit facilitates our understanding of fluvial behavior during the late Holocene.

Publication Date

July-December 2006

Journal Title

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science

Volume

113

Issue

3-4

First Page

57

Last Page

68

Copyright

© Copyright 2008 by the Iowa Academy of Science, Inc.

Language

EN

File Format

application/pdf

Recommended Citation

Dillon, Jeremy S. and Mandel, Rolfe D. (2006) "The Honey Creek Member: A New Holocene Alluvial Stratigraphic Unit in the Midwest," Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS, 113(3-4), 57-68.
Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/jias/vol113/iss3/3