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The flat terrace of the Bonneville shoreline has been used for a variety of purposes including housing developments and a hang-glider launch site at The Point of the Mountain


Introduction

In rapidly growing urban corridors, the physical environment and natural landscape are undergoing change and loss. Geoantiquities are natural, geologic records of both Earth history and environmental change at local and regional scales, with important global implications. Pleistocene to Holocene geoantiquities of Lake Bonneville are well recorded in deltas, spits and bars, glacial moraines, alluvial fans and debris flows, fluvial terraces, fault scarps, modern lakeshores, playas, and salt flats. Although these geoantiquities are well exposed along the Wasatch Front, Utah, they are particularly vulnerable to destruction, corruption, removal, and burial where current and anticipated population growth rates are double the national average. A number of urban issues including land use, population and growth planning, geohazards, and environmental quality and safety are intimately tied to the physical landscape, where geoantiquities can be of great societal value for educational, scientific, and practical reasons. However, human rates of removal and/or destruction of geoantiquities exceed the original depositional rates by orders of magnitude. Whole fans, bars, spits, and shoreline deposits are rapidly disappearing due to urban impact. Decisions on urban issues need to be based on a full complement of scientific information. Case studies on the Stockton Bar, immortalized by G. K. Gilbert, will serve as examples of geoantiquity investigations. In our model of geoantiquities interaction with Wasatch Front urban growth, geographic information systems (GIS) are used to integrate inventories of geoantiquties and to help predict urban impact on the landscape and to develop management plans for endangered areas. Education and information transfer are essential to protecting geoantiquities and to prioritizing those parts of the landscape that should be left intact and managed for long-term public and scientific benefit. Partnerships with government agencies, educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, public interest groups, and committed individuals provide pathways to raise awareness and produce broad involvement in planning and implementation of geoantiquities resource management.


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