Looking west we could see the escarpments of the Selkirk Mountains rising 2,500 feet above Lake Pend Oreille. The ice was almost TWO times higher than the top of those escarpments. The enormity of the great ice sheets is hard to fathom.
What's interesting is the great glacial ice dams would warm up, soften, and break, flooding the northwest. Then it cooled down again and the great ice dams reformed. This cycle repeated many times.
The people who write this stuff really need to visit the parts of North America and Europe that were buried under a mile of ice and ask why it melted.
From Wiki...
These types of articles just breeze over the fact that the ice sheets advanced and retreated, the ice dams formed, broke and reformed, the lakes filled, drained and refilled many times. How did this happen?The Missoula Floods (also known as the Spokane Floods or the Bretz Floods) refer to the cataclysmic floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge at the end of the last ice age. The glacial flood events have been researched since the 1920s. These glacial lake outburst floods were the result of periodic sudden ruptures of the ice dam on the Clark Fork River that created Glacial Lake Missoula. After each ice dam rupture, the waters of the lake would rush down the Clark Fork and the Columbia River, flooding much of eastern Washington and the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. After the rupture, the ice would reform, creating Glacial Lake Missoula again.
These people get apoplectic over a one or two degree potential rise as if it will end the earth. They are willfully ignorant of geological history.
From our drive yesterday, the Cabinet Mountains in Western Montana.
