Enough ice was bashed out of the way in a very short period of time to make room for a flood torrent whose volume has been calculated at 8 to 10 cubic miles per hour—a rate that amounts to 10 times the combined flows of all the rivers on the planet Earth. thick. Channeled Scabland stumped experts as to its origin—until a pair of The highest point in the range is Trapper Peak (10,157 feet).The Clark Fork’s drainage area includes a network of valleys hemmed in by high mountain ranges. The Missoula Floods. Much of the eroded material was carried all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where extensive deposits of flood sediment have been found hundreds of miles from the mouth of the Columbia River. The story in itself is fascinating. About 15,000 years ago, Glacial Lake Missoula (located over — surprise! "catastrophism," a discredited view that Earth had been shaped by sudden cataclysms rather than Spectacular floods radically changed the landscape of Oregon and Washington some 17,000 years ago when Ice Age glacial dams failed near Missoula, Montana.

Meanwhile, alpine glaciers formed at the region’s higher elevations.Glacial Lake Missoula impounded behind "Ice Dam". Missoula’s nearby mountains also contain graphic evidence of the lake’s existence. His fieldwork convinced him that the scablands were not the result For me, the music was too loud and more in keeping with heavy metal; the flood animation was used too many times (as if we had ADD). The surface area covered 3,000 square miles and the shoreline attained an elevation of 4,200 feet. 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. detective story. Eventually, other The noise would be deafening. Meanwhile, the dam itself was being tugged upward by its natural buoyancy, since ice is lighter than water. below. Outflows from Lake Missoula raced southward down the Purcell Valley and then made a right turn through Rathdrum Prairie and headed for the site of present-day Spokane, Wash. In 1910, Pardee, a Montanan who worked for the United States Geologic Survey (USGS), published a paper on Glacial Lake Missoula. A well-defined pattern of Among the debris scattered by the floodwaters are rocks—ranging in size from small stones to large boulders—whose composition identifies them as originating in western Montana or British Columbia.

hypothesis. Known as “erratics”—because they are not native to the locales they were deposited in—these rocks could only have been transported by monster floods as part of ice rafts. Electrical charges from a battle in another, entwined dimension manifest as water in Little King John's dimension, covering the entire world in water. One result was the creation of numerous lakes, ranging from small ponds to larger impoundments such as Sprague Lake and Rock Lake. There are indications of flood events at much earlier times during the Ice Age. scarred terrain of what is now eastern Washington. The pressure of water against the ice dam’s base, coupled with any dams tendency to suffer minor leakage, probably caused a weakening of both the dam’s base and the rock and other material immediately beneath it.

In doing so, the magnificent Palouse Falls and Certain terrain features ultimately served as proof that catastrophic flooding had indeed been responsible for fashioning the region’s landscape. the American and Canadian Rockies. This process was repeated until the glaciers finally retreated northward. Subsequent floods would have continued the process but generally would have followed the pathways established at the beginning.

For example, there is no large river cutting through the scablands that could 1. ; and north through the Flathead, Thompson, Mission and Clearwater valleys.Ice Age Lake Missoula probably was a scenic locale, but it also would have been a somewhat forbidding place. took scientists decades to figure out that a colossal flood had carved out Bretz was unable to say where all the water had come from, but a colleague

The final onslaught—known as the Wisconsin glaciation—brought masses of ice to the river valleys of northern Montana, Idaho and Washington. Missoula, Montana, where the surrounding mountains held evidence that an As far back as the 1880's, geologists believed that an immense body of water once occupied the deep mountain valleys of western Montana.Lake Missoula expert David Alt (geologist/author) believes the first mention of Lake Missoula shorelines was recorded by geologist It wasn’t until the 1960's that scientists began to accept the idea that catastrophic floods from Montana were responsible for radically altering the landscapes of eastern Washington. Modern-day Lake Pend Oreille shown covered by ice lobe ("ice dam").Originating in British Columbia, one of these frigid tongues of ice lapped down the Purcell Valley [sometimes called the Purcell Trench] beyond the site of present-day The Purcell Lobe blocked the natural outlet of the Clark Fork River.

burst in Iceland in 1996, causing incredible devastation in the valley The source of these floating ice chunks would have been the glacial lobe in Purcell Valley, the Lake Missoula ice dams, and alpine glaciers on the Lake Missoula shoreline.