They carved canyons, cut waterfalls, and sculpted a terrain of braided waterways today known as the channeled scablands.
ROSEMARY WARDLEY, NG STAFF
SOURCES: USGS; ATLAS OF OREGON
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 ...
Fascinating!
I have another item to add to my bucket list.
I’ve been down stream of it on the Columbia and you can see it was cut with a huge amount of water.
About time NGS got back to what they are supposed to be about.
I was born in that neighborhood. Dry Falls is a very interesting landmark in the middle of, basically, nowhere. And when you go west of there on highway 2 you can see rocks the size of houses just laying there in the middle of flat farmland. It’s really a cool area.
For those who are interested, these are both great reads on subjects atheists tend to misinterpret:
Good read.
Must get out to that part of the country sometime.
I’m in western Washington, but when I am over there I really enjoy the 20-mile drive from Dry Falls down to Soap Lake with all the small lakes along the way. Very scenic.
97% of the scientist’s opposed him?
Excellent article. And refreshingly lacking even a single use of the phrase “Climate Change”. The author will probably hear about that oversight and violation of compulsory requirements when he’s called into a session of Nat Geo’s Star Chamber.
P4L
I have a copy of “In the Beginning” by Dr. Brown. Well researched and a very good read.
Sun lakes and soap lake. I really love that area. Another great stop on a hot summer drive is here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7531193,-119.2186808,239m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
The maps view does not do it justice. The cool part is in the shade.
Randall Carlson specifically spoke of this area the other night. There was no ice lake. Find Randall on Joe Roagan podcasts, or you can find links to him speaking on various podcasts at http://sacredgeometryinternational.com
Bump to read later ...
Thanks for that great link, well worth watching.
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