Washington’s Ice Age terrain drawing more interest
Related Stories: Hooking people in geologic time, one gigantic flood at a time
Want more flood info? For general data visit www.iafi.org ; For more info on guides, visit www.keokeebooks.com ; For art of the floods, visit www.stevominski.com
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Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
Note: These were published 11 years ago, in the Spokesman Review (Spokane). This is continuation of a topic by columnist Paul Haeder about Eastern Washington’s Channeled Scablands, which have received more attention from the scientific community in the last few decades for its unique geological features.
Read Part 1 below:
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I was lucky to have been a university undergraduate in Tucson, Ariz., and hang around thinkers like paleo-ecologist Paul Martin, who also advanced a radical theory in the sciences focused in the Pleistocene, the same period that has been explored by Eastern Washington University professor Eugene Kiver and their former student Bruce Bjornstad in a quest for extra information about the super floods and current geologic make-up of the Northwest.
Martin’s theory was dubbed the ‘Blitzkrieg extinction,’ and he posits that starting around 13,000 years ago, an explosion of extinctions on this continent took place – 40 terrestial large mammals bit the proverbial dust. The wooly mammoth was one, but others included a collie-sized elephant species; short-faced bears double the size of grizzlies; giant armadillos; Prius-sized armor-plated glyptodonts; giant peccaries; a lion bigger and swifter than the African species; a dire wolf as tall as a great Dane.
Coming to the Northwest from the Southwest, I spent a lot of time trying to understand the people – farmers, environmentalists, planners – who work, play and live along the reaches of these gargantuan flood plains. This landscape has some Martian-like features creating climate and flora cover that truly define a place that finally has begun to start receiving recognition regionally and at the national level.
Here’s info from the first chapter of Kiver and Bjornstad’s book, under the heading,
“Monster Floods”:
Like nowhere else on Earth, eastern Washington is a dynamic land of contrasts shaped by colossal, cataclysmic floods, first of hot, searing basaltic lava, followed millions of years later by frigid, massive glacial outbursts. The Channeled Scabland was the end product of both of these earth-changing processes; one without the other would have produced a landscape far less unique and dramatic than that observed today. The Channeled Scabland includes Dry Falls, Grand Coulee, those potholes and Palouse hills and ripples from Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.
Here’s the enormity of those 89 to 100 floods: Glacial Lake Missoula was up to 2,000 feet deep and covered a whopping 3,000 square miles of western Montana. Every several years, the water behind the ice dam grew deep enough to “float” the ice wall.
Water then escaped over and under the ice dam, and, then the gushing-out period — the mother of all sluices. What took 125 years of glacier-melting speed to fill, the lake “would suddenly let loose, releasing an earth-shaking glacial outburst flood, also known as a jökulhlaup, up to 500 cubic miles of bashing, grinding, roaring water through Idaho, across the Channeled Scabland of eastern Washington and down the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific Ocean,” according to Bjornstad.
In layperson’s terms – that water was equal to the combined water volume of Lakes Erie and Ontario. That’s a flow rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world. Think hard: a wall of water up to 1,000 feet high.
The “rush out” of the lake took about three days to drain it, up to a week or two to make it to the Pacific. Both Kiver, who now lives in Anacortes but has a place in Cheney, and Bjornstad get jazzed up when discussing the value of “in-the-field” geology to humanity, the over 100 years of ice floods accumulated evidentiary research, and how our own futures and those of our great-great-great grandchildren are all bundled up in how humans are changing nature too quickly and how we have become the only species on earth to change climate.
They also count the gifts of both the billions of years of incremental change as well as those few thousand attributed to the cataclysmic floods. Our own aquifer is the major “gift” of the ice age floods – it starts from Lake Pend Oreille and makes its way to downtown Spokane.
While the volume of the aquifer is 10 trillion gallons, Bjornstad and Kiver say it is subject to degradation, pollution, overuse; half a million residents and businesses draw 146 million gallons of water daily from it.
Enter teacher Eileen Starr, who is 73 and has more than 50 years experience teaching K-12, writing curriculum for individual schools and districts while also pushing the entire “science needs to be fun and hands on” mantra in Spokane, Chelan, Colbert, Cheney and West Valley schools.
She’s on her own crusade, both tied to the drama-story of the Ice Age floods and how to get young people (she’s also taught at EWU and Valley City College in Fargo, N.D.) back into what she thinks was the best frame for this country’s scientific foundation.
The last push for more science happened nationally with concerted cohesive support after Sputnik hit earth’s orbit and the Mercury and Apollo programs took off. That was the Earth Sciences Curriculum Project (ESCP), and since Reagan, science in schools has slipped tremendously.
Starr’s current project is “Glaciers, Ice Dams, and the Channeled Scablands: A Hands-on Science Curriculum for Grades 4-8,” tied to the Cheney-Spokane Chapter of the Ice Age Floods Institute, a consortium of unpaid ice age floods aficionados looking for this natural history multi-state diorama to turn Eastern Washington’s main ice age flood area into a tourist wonderland. It’s a nice little group of lessons – stream tables, water and ice experiments, even how sand and bolder deposits are formed.
“Science has to be fun,” said Starr, whose husband is also an emeritus chemistry professor at Eastern. This article started off as first-person travel piece on my trip to Palouse Falls, one of the country’s most dramatic displays of the continuous floods while also ranking as the only running falls from that explosion.
It’s a 186-foot spectacular cascading testament to the region’s hardscrabble geology and persistent flora and fauna. As a writer, I then progressed into all these connections to the main-stem of the story – two geologists prepared to take people through the scarred landscapes; Steve H. Ominski, preeminent artist who has the cover art images for both books; Starr, the curriculum Pied Piper; the hard-working folk in Sandpoint at Keokee Press; even a former urban planning professor of mine who has been working with students on Ice Age Floods Trail brochures.
These days the scientific tales of our globe need more storytellers, interpreters and especially young and old enthusiasts prepared to carry forth the accumulated knowledge of the pioneers and practitioners of sciences with more innovation and gusto by professionals with a passion.
Maybe hip Seattle isn’t a litmus test, but when I recently celebrated my fiancé’s new job in a trendy Vitto’s Restaurant and Lounge on First Hill, she pulled Bjornstad’s book out of my satchel, held it up and asked friends and the bar crowd:
“A guy carrying a book like this, sexy or nerdy?”
Hands up for sexy on the science book. These ice age flood fanatics have a greater goal in mind – getting roadside and footpath signs put up, maybe a visitors center, and certainly positive press about what could rank as a Seventh Wonder of the World here in the Inland Empire.
Part Two:
Hooking people in geologic time, one gigantic flood at a time
Great rivers were born suddenly, operated for a very brief time, and then abruptly ran dry. – J Harlen Bretz (1930)
We are a visual race, so imagining the path of floods on a geological bender covering a 600-mile long 100-mile wide path of earth from Montana to the Willamette Valley and Pacific – demands some imagination, and some evidence.
Prominent examples that can all be found within a few hour’s drive or less from Spokane include:
* Channeled Scabland
* Riddle Hill
* Steamboat Rock
* Dry Falls
* Rathdrum Prairie-Spokane Valley aquifer
* Lake Pend Oreille
* Drumheller Channels
These seven landmarks are just some of the many recognizable features of the “megafloods,” which now easily seen from outer space with satellite-assisted photography. As recent, geologically speaking as the flood area is, recognition from scientific community of these natural forces is just beginning.
In the 1920s, J. Harlen Bretz was pursuing the “geological cache of the century” by proposing an “outrageous hypothesis” of the great Spokane Flood. His first thesis of catastrophe went against the elders of geology, and his Ice Age Floods proposition was a thorn in the side of conventional geologic and hydro-geologic wisdom.
Bretz, with a doctorate from University of Chicago and then later a professorship at the University of Washington, became a scientific sleuth and someone obsessed with this “neck of the rocks.”
Critics looked at his catastrophic flood theory as blasphemy declaring it too close to the Biblical Noah story. For 30 years Bretz and others kept at this detailed study of the Inland Northwest’s unique landforms until 1979, two years before his death, when he was vindicated with the highest honor in his field, the Penrose Medal.
[ Transform Plate Boundaries ]
Today, we might take high speeds for granted, like a mere 80 miles an hour on the highway in this supersonic age. Put into perspective, though, imagine the intensity and force that carved out Grand Coulee, a 50-mile long trench.
We’re talking H2O and SUV-sized boulders and basalt detritus as big as basketball courts moving at such fury – 60 to 80 miles an hour – that loose stones the size of Airstreams ended up all over the place. I remember hearing something interesting taking place on campus while interviewing at Cascadia Community College in Bothell, Wash.
The groundskeepers had to stop their jack-hammering project midway on a single boulder, which was located in a spot where the landscapers had visions of flat grass, ferns and petunias. Students and a faculty member petitioned to have the demolition halted because the VW Beetle-sized rock was an ice age erratic – a giant boulder ice-rafted from afar and deposited by raging waters.
This erratic is a small tribute to geologic forces – the recent floods and what the fossil record shows indicate that North America was one heck of a continent populated with a menagerie as dynamic as Africa’s. That little northeast Seattle community college and a few students and a faculty member fighting for a rock further ramified my belief that all stories need to be told, celebrated.
I’ve also been propelled by the stories of Alfred R. Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist, who was dubbed “one of the forgotten fathers of modern science.”
Wallace was so far ahead of his time he had his own independent theory of evolution through natural selection. He ended up exploring the Amazon starting in 1852 and later Malay Archipelago as part of his quest to know how “it all had come about.”
For Inland Northwest residents, J. Harlen Bretz can be considered our own Alfred Wallace. Wallace’s ship Mischief took him and his cohorts around the world because they were island biogeographers.
He also inspired geologists of today, like EWU emeritus professor Eugene Kiver, fellow EWU professor Dale Stradling, and their former student, geologist Bruce Bjornstad, who are following the trail of the floods and learning how things got formed in the Pacific Northwest.
In the eyes of many professional geologists, amateur natural historians and some outdoors enthusiasts, none of the Seven Wonders of the World or UNESCO heritage sites can hold a candle to the Ice Age Floods. Those continuous cataclysmic floods emanating from a glacier melt 20,000 years ago and ending 5,000 to 7,000 years later still blow away average minds.
Kiver and Bjornstad see this glacial activity as the most incredible geologic turbulences known to the earth. Bjornstad, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory geologist, writes about the forces of geology and climate that created these wild, weird landforms: Like nowhere else on Earth, eastern Washington is a dynamic land of contrasts shaped by colossal, cataclysmic floods, first of hot, searing basaltic lava, followed millions of years later by frigid, massive glacial outbursts.
The Channeled Scabland was the end product of both of these earth-changing processes; one without the other would have produced a landscape far less unique and dramatic than that observed today.
This energy, the draw of the basalt, all those coulees and dry falls, those boulder-sized erratics and the sleuth work of Bretz behind this new and revolutionary theory in geology are the components that drove Bjornstad to write the book, On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods.
That synergy of both the Ice Age Floods (the last ones occurring between 13,000 to 15,000 years ago) and the magnificence of the earlier geological forces (2.6 million years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene) that laid the groundwork for those artfully-formed soils, stones, and entire mesas, buttes, coulees and mountains hooked Bjornstad big time.
His story is important in connecting the story of how the ice age floods generated their impetus to calcify into this state’s lore and make it to the world stage of geology and natural history. Bruce lives in Richland working on sediment and soil analysis as part of his work to help “clean up” the nuclear waste at Hanford. His early rock-hound days started in Wisconsin.
He caught the bug and went to the University of New Hampshire and then ended up in Oregon. Then, more of the bug and focus on the slack water of Walla Walla while at Eastern Washington University under the tutelage of Eugene Kiver and other profs. Ice Age Floods were Kiver’s big focus, one allowing him to trudge around the field studying the evidence and mapping great land forms.
Both Bjornstad and Kiver penned a book, “On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods – The Northern Reaches.” This is the second in the Ice Age volumes, which came out in June 2012. Bruce’s solo effort published by the same Sandpoint, Idaho, publisher, Keokee, “On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods: A Geological Field Guide to the Mid-Columbia Basin,” came out in 2006.
END Note:
Look, these articles came out 2012? And, alas, I have not kept up with the geologist, Bruce Bjornstad, and lately, though, it is clear that racism and Trump Derangement Syndrome have overtaken this bloke as he appeared on my Facebook page.
It’s easy for me to hate these thinkers, and I give two squats about their geology or research or science or books — which I am interested in — when they are fucking racists. Here, on Fuck You Book: Bruce Bjornstad —
Paul Haeder “You forget that Hamas started the bombing and war. Israel naturally retaliated. What do you expect? Yes, I stand proudly for freedom, democracy and leaders like Obama and Biden – opposite of Putin and POS Trump.”
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Now, he reacted to my post: “The socialists supporting Lincoln at the time weren’t uncritically endorsing everything about him; they were finding the revolutionary elements of his policies, and also of the social base that backed those policies. The equivalent is the case when we see anti-colonial demonstrators displaying pictures of Putin, or flying the Russian flag. Not only are Putin’s policies having an overall positive effect on the global anti-imperialist movement; but more importantly, his supporters represent a massive part of the worldwide social base behind the resistance against the hegemon. That’s why it’s not even accurate to consider Operation Z “Putin’s war;” he’s only the one who happened to be in charge when the majority of the Russian people mandated that action be taken against U.S.-backed Ukrainian fascism. He’s merely a symbol of something that’s almost infinitely bigger than him, something that’s accelerating the transition away from U.S. hegemony.”
Here’s the racist geologist: Bruce Bjornstad — Putin the good guy? BS!
My response:
“Who’s your good guy, Bruce? Come on, give me a few examples, please? Ahh, you have none. Stuck in academia! Typical. You love this criminal? ……Monsters, you know that, USA, republican and democrat.”
US President Joe Biden on 25 October said that he has “no notion” that the Health Ministry in Gaza, journalists, and humanitarian groups are telling the truth about the soaring number of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip 18 days into Israel’s indiscriminate carpet bombing campaign.
“What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden said Wednesday during a joint press conference with Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” the US president added. However, he did not explain why he believes Palestinians lie about the genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Well, ignorance is a huge problem with scientists (sic). This is what I retorted with:
“You are colonized, man, so sad. So sad, dude. I am embarassed for your ignorance. Man, oh, man, what a waste. Get real, please. Embarrassing. Obama? Biden? Trump? Bush? Reagan? Are you just deranged? Here, real stuff: BUT YOU WILL NOT LISTEN, I can tell the arrogance, the arrogance. ………………
“The son of an Israeli general raised inculcated with the value of Zionism, Miko Peled’s perspective shifted after the tragic loss of his niece to a terrorist attack. Driven by that tragedy to figure out what why a Palestinian suicide bomber would take his own life, along with the life of innocents, he began questioning Zionism. On today’s episode, the author and activist engages important and provocative questions like does Israel have a right to exist, and should we refer to Hamas as a terrorist group? — questions that someone with his life experiences is most qualified to answer. A truly fascinating episode . . . . . “
To Bruce B on Facebook: “Do you even read?”
Facebook by me: “Goddamn red neck, Bruce, you are so retrograde, just go the way of the Dodo! ……………”
More Facebook message by me: “Shit, the ignorance you breed is dangerous . . . “
More Facebook: “Ignorance, at EWU! Whew.”
“You forget that Hamas started the bombing and war. Israel naturally retaliated. What do you expect? Yes, I stand proudly for freedom, democracy and leaders like Obama and Biden – opposite of Putin and POS Trump.” — Bruce Bjornstad
Paul Haeder, Author 