Creation of lake-based records of climate change in the western United States; response of prehistoric Native American cultures to climate change; application of cosmogenic isotopes to the dating of glacial features in the Rocky Mountains.
Larry Benson is a hydrologist/geochemist in the National Research Program, Boulder. He was an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a principal investigator at the Desert Research Institute, Reno, a visiting scientist at the University of California-Berkeley, and a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining the U.S. Geological Survey in 1982. He was Chief of the Arid Regions Climate Project and his research focuses on the creation of lake-based records of climate change in the western U.S. and the response of prehistoric Native American cultures to climate change. His research also includes the application of cosmogenic isotopes to the dating of glacial features in the Rocky Mountains.