Posted on 05/13/2006 5:26:15 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In this companion Web site to the NOVA program Mystery of the Megaflood, explore the Channeled Scabland through an interactive map, read an interview with geologist Vic Baker, take a geology quiz, visit our teacher's guide, and more... Mystery of the Megaflood: What unleashed a catastrophic flood that scarred thousands of square miles in the American Northwest? Airs on PBS September 20, 2005... Airs on PBS May 16, 2006.
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
show is mentioned in a later post:
Tracking Myth to Geological Reality
Science Magazine | 11/4/2005 | Kevin Krajick*
Posted on 11/05/2005 3:20:12 PM EST by Lessismore
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1516400/posts
Mystery of the Megaflood
Starring: Stacy Keach
and Peter Thomas
Director: Mark Davis
Ice Age LakeIt is especially surprising to find evidence of a great lake with no sign of fish, not even a few scattered scales. Why no fish fossils? Perhaps no fish. The summer murk of suspended rock flour probably made the lake a poor habitat for most of the kinds of fish native to western Montana. And the lake's sudden drainings surely flushed any fish that may have been around. It would be nice to know that people were around to see Glacial Lake Missoula and its humongous floods. I would like to think that those spectacles were not entirely wasted on hairy mastodons, giant beavers, oversized bison. That may not be a forlorn hope. Archeologists have good evidence that people lived in North America before the end of the last ice age, perhaps thousands of years before. Some of them may have known the lake and watched its great floods. But the archeologists have not yet dug up any direct evidence that would place people in the Pacific Northwest during that time. Still, we can imagine them in those landscapes, witness to an enormous lake and the horrendous floods it unleashed.
by David Alt
Glacial Lake Missoula
and Its Humongous Floods
David D. Alt
The ice dam broke.
Great. Wreck the ending. Someone pulled that on me right in the middle of "Titanic".
L
What was remarkable is the the flood happened many time.
A similar flood event happened in Central Asia I think, somewhere near modern Lake Baikal.
The Lake Bonneville FloodThe flood left a ground record of its effects in the Snake River Plain by a variety of depositional and erosional features. At Portneuf Narrows, a canyon 45 miles northwest of Red Rock Pass, the flood is estimated to have reached a height of 400 feet. The release of water from Lake Bonneville was apparently initiated by sudden erosion of unconsolidated material on the northern shoreline near Red Rock Pass... Malde (1968) estimated that the probable peak discharge of the flood was approximately one-third cubic miles per hour (15 million cubic feet per second). This is to be compared with a maximum historic discharge in the upper Snake River of 72,000 cfs at Idaho Falls in June of 1894. The total flood volume is believed to be about 380 cubic miles. The catastrophic flood from glacial Lake Missoula, which swept across northern Idaho, Washington and Oregon, caused far more disturbance than did the Bonneville Flood... The Bonneville flood followed the Snake River Canyon to the Columbia River in Oregon. At several localities such as Tammany Bar near Lewiston, a tributary of the Snake River, deposits of the gigantic floods merged. Deposits from the Spokane Flood were laid by backflood up the Snake River from the easternmost channel of the scabland. The Bonneville flood deposits were placed over about 20 Missoula backfloods or graded flood-laid beds and 21 more Missoula graded beds overlie the Bonneville-flood gravels. Therefore, the Bonneville flood occurred some time in the middle of the 2,000 to 2500 years period during which the 40 plus Missoula floods were released.
Idaho Museum of Natural History
There went the neighborhood.
We live only 7 miles or so from the southern tip of 1200' deep Lake Pend Oreille. Best well water I've ever tasted.
painting of Glacial Lake Missoula by Byron Pickering:
It made the best coffee.
Man I miss that place.
L
Columbia Flood Basalt: an earlier catastropheThe last of perhaps a dozen flood events over the same landscape happened just 13,000 years ago, but the reason the landscape was plucked into cliffs and potholes was because of another catastrophe that happened 14 million years ago... Fourteen million years ago, Earth opened in cracks in Idaho and eastern Oregon, pouring forth streams of basalt lava that covered much of the landscape. This was an oozing, rather than an explosive lava, called a flood basalt. No human ever witnessed a flood basalt in process. They are very rare events: the Deccan Flood Basalt in India probably was triggered by the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Siberian Flood Basalt probably was triggered by an even bigger meteor impact that ended the Paleozoic nearly 240 million years ago. Our Columbian Flood Basalt is smaller in depth and area than the other two giants, and there is no particular evidence as to why it occurred.
by Connie Barlow
2005
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
