High-Resolution Stable Isotope Paleotopography of the John Day Region, Oregon, United States

The John Day region of central Oregon, United States contains ∼50 million years of near-continuous, fossiliferous sedimentation, representing one of the world’s richest archives of Cenozoic terrestrial ecosystems and climate. Stable isotope proxy data from this region are commonly used to infer the elevation history of the Cascades, which intercept westerly moisture in transit to the John Day region. However, the Blue Mountains, which accreted in the Mesozoic, create a region of local high topography that can confound signals of Cascades uplift. John Day deposits, including the John Day Formation, are divided into an eastern facies located within the Blue Mountains and a western facies in the adjacent plains. As a result, the Blue Mountains may have supported gradients in climate and ecology between the eastern and western facies, and constraining these gradients is necessary for reconstructing past topography and ecosystem change. In order to define the Cenozoic extent and magnitude of Blue Mountains topography we use oxygen isotopes in authigenic clay minerals to construct a spatially resolved map of local elevation. We find that the oxygen isotope composition of clay minerals within the Blue Mountains is ∼3‰ lower than in the adjacent high plains, and this offset is mostly constant throughout our record (spanning ∼50 – 5 Ma). We attribute this offset to Blue Mountains topography, either directly from upslope rainout or indirectly through the effect of elevation on local variations in precipitation seasonality. Our results highlight the importance of local topographic features in regional paleotopography reconstructions and provide important biogeographical context for the rich paleo-floral and -faunal records preserved in John Day sediments.

Archbishop Parker’s Psalter

Printed books of psalms in English verse were extremely popular in Elizabethan England. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, published his own metrical psalter in 1567. It includes eight deceptively simple musical settings by Tallis, one in each of the eight traditional modes. The third of these settings has become famous as the theme of a fantasia by Vaughan Williams. This chapter looks at Tallis’s eight “tunes” and the tradition of metrical psalms, as well as Elizabethan views on musical mode and expression. It also discusses the printer John Day, who published (sometimes with questionable accuracy) these and various other works by Tallis during the 1560s.