Green River Formation

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The Green River Formation is an Eocene geologic formation that records the sedimentation in a group of intermountain lakes in three basins along the present-day Green River in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The sediments are deposited in very fine layers, a dark layer during the growing season and a light-hue inorganic layer in the dry season. Each pair of layers is called a varve and represents one year. The sediments of the Green River Formation present a continuous record of six million years. The mean thickness of a varve here is 0.18 mm, with a minimum thickness of 0.014 mm and maximum of 9.8 mm. The sedimentary layers were formed in a large area named for the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River. The three separate basins lie around the Uinta Mountains (north, east, and south) of northeastern Utah: an area in northwestern Colorado east of the Uintas a larger area in the southwest corner of Wyoming just north of the Uintas known as Lake Gosiute the largest area, in northeastern Utah and western Colorado south of the Uintas, known as Lake Uinta Fossil Butte National Monument in Lincoln County, Wyoming, is in a part of the formation known as Fossil Lake because of its abundance of exceptionally well-preserved fish fossils.