Bear Lake is located 100 km northeast of Salt Lake City and lies along the course of the Bear River, the largest river in the Great Basin. The lake, which is one of the oldest extant lakes in North America, occupies a tectonically active half-graben and contains hundreds of meters of Quaternary sediment. This volume is the culmination of more than a decade of coordinated investigations aimed at a holistic understanding of this long-lived alkaline lake in the semiarid western United States. Its 14 chapters, with 20 contributing authors, contain geological, mineralogical, geochemical, paleontological, and limnological studies extending from the drainage basin to the depocenter. The studies span both modern and paleoenvironments, including a 120-m-long sediment core that captures a continuous record of the last two glacial-interglacial cycles.