I think the Pleistocene flash flooding of Oregon and Washington State is a cool read, those ice dams at Lake Missoula must have been huge.
Posted on 07/20/2002 4:00:28 PM PDT by gcruse
My suggestion is that we should find which ancient deep-pockets republican corporation is responsible for all that sediment and force them to remediate: FILL IT IN! </sarcasm>
So I guess there's nothing unusual about Lake Powell. Somebody should tell the Sierra Club.
I think the Pleistocene flash flooding of Oregon and Washington State is a cool read, those ice dams at Lake Missoula must have been huge.
The feds are just pissed because people have fun there.
According to geologists, Lake Bonneville was formed from an ice dam during the last major Ice Age on this planet. As the glaciers receded, the dam probably melted and gave way about 15,500 years ago, resulting in a huge torrent of water that craved out the Snake River Canyon and much of the canyons of the Columbia River basin.
It's been speculated that many of the human legends of a Great Flood may be based on humans witnessing the collapse of ice dams at the end of the last great Ice Age causing massive land flooding; the stories got passed down through oral tradition. Oceanographer Robert Ballard (of Titanic rediscovery fame) said in National Geographic magazine that the Black Sea around 9,000 BC rose quite rapidly because of the combination of water coming from the north from glacial melting and the sudden rush of water from the south through the Bosphorus Straits.
The ice dam formed and burst some 40 times.
I don't buy this Grand Canyon formation theory though. There should be some heavy evidence of a flood of such magnitude many miles below the dam location such as plunge pools and ripples.
Also assuming that the elevation of the river bed above and below the dam would be about the same you would think that there would be a waterfall where the escaping water first gouged the river bed below the breech.
They don't really know squat, except they are SURE it wasn't Noah's flood. Another example of our tax dollars at waste.
Like you, I am skeptical of this theory. The Mississippi River flood of the late sixties covered much of Miss., La. and some other states. I remember seeing water as far as the eye could see from 35,00 ft. A lake with 37 times that much water would have covered quite and area, too much IMO to be contained by a dam at one end.
Talking to myself I say it was lake Missoula that formed some 40 times.
Lake Bonneville had nothing to do with an ice dam. Appx 17,000 years ago the lake reached the level of Red Rock Pass (5,220') in S. Idaho and wore it down about 375 feet in 1 year.
The leftover is the Great Salt Lake and given enough rain Lake Bonneville could form again.
Why not? It doesn't matter how much water is in there, just how deep it is and how wide the chokepoint is.
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