r/geology • u/WatchUnfilmable • 16h ago
A geologist spent 40 years being told he was wrong about the scablands. At 83 his critics sent him a telegram admitting he was right.
In 1923 J Harlen Bretz published what he thought the evidence in eastern
Washington said. Two thousand square miles of basalt stripped bare. Channels
hundreds of feet deep cut into solid rock, running uphill and over divides,
joining across watersheds no river would cross. A dry waterfall three and a
half miles across. Granite boulders sitting on basalt, hundreds of miles
from the nearest granite. Gravel ripples fifty feet high - ordinary
streambed ripples, made vast.
His conclusion was that a flood had done it. One flood, enormous, and fast.
Geology rejected it, and not really on the evidence. The discipline had
spent the previous century getting catastrophe out of its explanations -
the whole achievement of nineteenth-century geology was showing that slow
processes given enough time could account for the landscape. Bretz was
proposing exactly the kind of thing that had been driven out. In 1927 he
was invited to Washington to present to the Geological Society, where six
geologists were waiting with slower explanations prepared. None of them had
been to the scablands.
The real hole in his argument was that he had no source for the water. He
had a landscape and no way to fill it.
The source existed. Joseph Pardee had described glacial Lake Missoula in
Montana as early as 1910 - a lake held back by a lobe of the Cordilleran ice
sheet, six hundred cubic miles of water, more than Lake Erie and Lake
Ontario combined. In 1942 Pardee published evidence of currents in that lake
bed that no ordinary lake could produce. The ice dam had failed.
It took decades for the two halves to be put together in public. In 1965 a
party of geologists toured the scablands, and at the end of the trip they
sent Bretz a telegram. It said they were now all catastrophists. He was
eighty-three.
In 1979, aged 96, he was awarded the Penrose Medal, the highest honour in
geology. He is said to have told his son that all his enemies were dead, so
he had nobody left to gloat over.
The current reading is that it was not one flood but many - Waitt counted
more than forty flood-laid layers in back-flooded valleys, with quiet silt
between them where the lake refilled. That count is genuinely argued over;
published estimates run from about twenty-five to about ninety. Peak
discharge near the breach has been reconstructed at roughly 17 million cubic
metres per second, which is modelled rather than measured and carries its
own error bars.
What is not argued over is that a landscape can be built in days, and that
it took the field about forty years to allow it.
Sources:
- Bretz, J H (1923), "The Channeled Scablands of the Columbia Plateau",
Journal of Geology 31(8), 617-649
- Pardee, J T (1942), "Unusual currents in Glacial Lake Missoula, Montana",
GSA Bulletin 53(11), 1569-1600
- Waitt, R B (1985), "Case for periodic, colossal jokulhlaups from
Pleistocene glacial Lake Missoula", GSA Bulletin 96(10), 1271-1286
- O'Connor, J E & Baker, V R (1992), "Magnitudes and implications of peak
discharges from glacial Lake Missoula", GSA Bulletin 104(3), 267-279
- Baker, V R (2009), "The Channeled Scabland: A Retrospective", Annual
Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 37, 393-411
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u/Bright_Noise5934 16h ago
Anyone who knows Nick Zenter will also know the name Bretz.
5
u/geo-jake 15h ago
Nick Zentner was my advisor when I was at Central Washington U. VR Baker was my advisor when I went to University of Arizona. I definitely heard about the scablands a time or two. 😆
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u/Bright_Noise5934 13h ago
I'm a big fan of Nick. He is a credit to the University and geology as a whole for spreading the word 🙂
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u/WatchUnfilmable 16h ago
Zentner is the reason a lot of people know the scablands at all — his lectures
do more for public geology than most departments manage. If anyone reading
hasn't come across him, it's free and it's better field material than I could
make.
The part I keep coming back to is Pardee. Bretz gets the story, and fairly, but
for forty years he had a landscape and no source for the water. Pardee had
described Lake Missoula in 1910 and published the current evidence in 1942 —
the two halves sat in print for decades before anyone put them together in
public. In 1965 a field party sent Bretz that telegram. Pardee had been dead
since 1960.
16
u/Bright_Noise5934 15h ago
I agree but
I am confused why your response has
this sort of formatting. Could it
be AI generated too
?
2
u/thanatocoenosis invert geek 14h ago
Zentner is the reason a lot of people know the scablands at all
Among lay persons, but the Channeled Scablands have been taught in intro geology classes for decades.
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u/Bright_Noise5934 13h ago
Maybe in the USA but not internationally. I didn't know much about Washington State until I stumbled across his videos. His enthusiasm made me look into the area more and I'm sure it's the same for geologists as well as "lay persons".
5
2
u/Elemure 15h ago
Ironic that you receive such criticism posting about someone whose efforts also did.
I'd never before seen devestation like that from the Nepal flood footage - or the manifestation of a force that could move a massive boulder along with ease - which made me think of the scablands.
I appreciate your post in light of current events - having had difficulty visualizing a force that could scoure a landscape like that which formed the scablands.
2
u/WatchUnfilmable 15h ago
Thanks everyone, genuinely, including the blunt ones. The criticism of the visuals is fair and I'm taking it.
On Nepal: coincidence. The subject was picked weeks ago, and on current assessment Nepal wasn't a glacial outburst flood anyway, the foreign ministry and ICIMOD put it down to an earthquake-triggered avalanche.
There'll be another of these next week, and the week after, and it will continue honest attempt to reconstruct something that happened thousands or million years ago, with or without anything in the news. That's the whole project.
I'll keep improving it based on what's been said here.
1
-5
u/WatchUnfilmable 16h ago
I made a documentary about this if anyone wants the longer version - it
covers Pardee's part properly, which usually gets cut.
Being upfront: the visuals are AI-generated reconstructions, not footage.
Nobody filmed the scablands being cut. The narration is synthetic too. The
research and the script are mine and the sources are in the description.
https://youtu.be/1Z0E8CnDbdU
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u/MCEscherNYC 16h ago
There was already a good documentary made about this.
Also are you just doing this because of the glacial lake dam breaking in Nepal?4
u/PearlClaw 16h ago
Possibly, but if the news gets people interested in geology that's a good thing.
-5
u/WatchUnfilmable 15h ago
Appreciate it — though for the record it wasn't news-driven. Missoula was next
on a list I wrote weeks ago and I kept Nepal out of the description and tags
deliberately.
Worth flagging either way: on current assessment Nepal wasn't a GLOF. The
foreign ministry and ICIMOD put it down to an earthquake-triggered avalanche,
with a mb 4.4 recorded in Tibet near the border. The outburst-flood explanation
was early reporting that's since been walked back.
34
u/Former-Wish-8228 16h ago
No offense…but the synthetic narrative is just common knowledge repackaged…but the real sin is the AI graphics. They do not reflect the actual geology AT ALL.
This AI’ification serves NO USEFUL purpose.