Note: this topic is from . Thanks BenLurkin.
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Posted on 03/09/2017 8:41:09 AM PST by BenLurkin
In the middle of eastern Washington, in a desert that gets less than eight inches of rain a year, stands what was once the largest waterfall in the world. It is three miles wide and 400 feet high—ten times the size of Niagara Falls—with plunge pools at its base suggesting the erosive power of an immense flow of water. Today there is not so much as a trickle running over the cataract’s lip...
Dry Falls is not the only curiosity in what geologists call the Columbia Plateau. Spread over 16,000 square miles are hundreds of other dry waterfalls, canyons without rivers that might have carved them (called “coulees”), mounds of gravel as tall as skyscrapers, deep holes in the bedrock that would swallow entire city blocks, and countless oddly placed boulders....
The first farmers in the region named the rocky parts “scablands” and dismissed them as useless as they planted their wheat on the silt-rich hills. But geologists were not so dismissive; to them, the scablands were an enigma.
...
Their source? A giant ice-age lake—Glacial Lake Missoula—that formed when the Cordilleran ice sheet progressed south and blocked the Clark Fork river valley, forming a dam of ice 2,000 feet high.
Behind that dam, water from the Clark Fork gathered, forming a lake with as much water as Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined, stretching for hundreds of miles in Montana’s mountainous river valleys. Then the dam broke, and a torrent of water with ten times the combined flow of all the world’s rivers barreled into eastern Washington, reaching speeds approaching 80 miles an hour, decimating the terrain and leaving giant current ripples and gravel bars in its wake.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
This is a great article!
I grew up in the Tri-Cities at the top of the bend of the Columbia just before it turns West.
Thanks for the post.
It was fascinating.
When NatGeo isn’t moralizing about stuff they shouldn’t they have some really good articles.
Velikovsky discusses the multiple floods - the parting of the Red Sea being the most prominent one he references - along with their probable cause (near passby of Venus). All of which is recent enough in documented world history to not need 13,000 years of silliness. :)
Well, we all know now that the science is settled. It was human activity and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that caused this to create global warming and climate change. (sarc)
The hills where I lived in Moscow, Idaho were current ripples from this.
Yes, and now that he is dead anyone can say anything about the theory. What is funny is that NatGeo actually published this article with so many tidbits like:
“Bretz was making arguments, and no one was going into the field to see anything,” Baker said. “They were just countering his arguments with theory.” And because scientists are first and foremost human beings, they’re loathe to change their theories or their minds because of mere data.
...But that might just compound the error, because it neglects the fact that scientists almost always favor their own theories over others’, and rarely are those theories completely right....
...The authorities in the field were invested in a particular theory, and contrary evidence was dismissed without an adequate hearing...
But yeah that was the 20th century, good thing for us that we can sleep like babies in the 21st century - you know, since all of our scientist are 100% accurate and honest now.
Amazing vistas!
Do you know if anyone ever searches the gravel piles for Gold, etc?
Worlds in Collision is one of my favorites. I think I’ll reread it again! Venus has been very big and bright the last couple of weeks.
At the southern end of the flood scablands is the Wallula gap. It is a 2 kilometer opening in the solid basalt walls that the Columbia River flows today. When the Missoula flood hit the Wallula gap, the volume of flood was so great that it started to back up an form a lake in the lower scablands. At peak flow it is estimated the volume of water flowing through the Wallua gap to be 10 million cubic meters per second.
Bttt!
Never heard of it.
Gold panning in Washington is a pretty limited hobby.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks BenLurkin.
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