Catastrophe and Cartography - Cataracts

welcome back to another episode of cartography and catastrophe today we're going to focus on cataracts around the world and these aren't the cataracts you get in your eyes these are caused by massive amounts of water flowing over the landscape one of the best places to view a modern cataract is over at niagara falls and i think that's the perfect place to start out for those of you that have not been to niagara falls yet i'd highly recommend it because you get a really good idea of just how powerful these waterfalls can be and already we can see the classic horseshoe or cataract shape right here i really want you to pay attention to that shape because we're going to be seeing a lot here throughout the rest of the video and if we change our orientation that gives us an even better look we just have a whole river's worth of water flowing over this cliff face right here and very slowly over time the rocks here will erode and fall down and this cataract will work its way further and further back another way to think about this is that a couple hundred or even thousand years ago this waterfall was not located here it was much further up here then slowly over the years it's eroded back further and further to its present location as we change our orientation one more time you can see that there's a large cliff along the entire rim here and that's something else you really want to burn into your mind because we're going to see this later on in some unexpected locations to give you an idea of just how much water is flowing over the niagara falls let's take a look at some video as you can see in the video there's a lot of water pouring over the horseshoe falls still the amount of erosion is pretty slim and even though this water is flowing 24 7 for long periods of time it doesn't erode very far at all now what i want to do is go back to google earth here and we're going to measure how far it is from side to side using the ruler tool we can either use miles or feet i think feet would probably make the most sense we'll click here drag over to the far side and it's just about a thousand feet at its current widest area here for the horseshoe falls you'll want to remember that number as well so we have about a thousand feet from side to side for the pretty iconic niagara falls and if we measure here it's even under a thousand feet about 800 okay so that's niagara falls let's head over to one closer to home for me here in washington and that is snoqualmie falls snoqualmie falls is a bit harder to see the cataract and that's why when i was there in person i noticed on one of the display boards there was a cool photo that really showed you the shape of the cataract now that you have that visual you might be able to see it better here the cataract kind of goes from the viewpoint here wraps all the way around to there what that means is that at one point there was a lot of water flowing over this entire region not just a little narrow spot right here most likely snoqualmie falls was caused at the end of the younger driest as all those glaciers were melting and running through this area let's take a look at the falls as they were when i was there in february if you've ever watched twin peaks then this might look pretty familiar to you this is where they have the great northern lodge and the waterfall right there what i want you to understand though is that the current river is just cutting through one small portion of the cataract and it's clearly been doing that for hundreds and thousands of years it's cutting through this one small spot but you have to remember that in the past this entire cliff face was just covered with pouring water flowing over the edges which is what carved these steep cliffs and then eventually over time the water output reduced to the current river and then carved the smaller snoqualmie falls which we have right here and based on the erosion that we could see here most likely the snoqualmie river has been flowing through this location for the last few thousand years and that's why there's this fairly steep cliff right here and it's a little bit lower than the rest of the cataract around the edges so there's our second cataract for the day and if we measure this one across from side to side let's see how big this one is [Music] looks like it's about 700 feet so a little bit smaller than niagara falls in fact and you can probably see that better now we're gonna head around the planet now to south america and check out iguazu falls which it won't be in as good of detail but it's the same principle and we have a cataract right here with the cliff walls and tons of water flowing over it but it's pretty similar to niagara falls all things considered where you have the river here just flowing through and causing the waterfall [Music] this one seems to be a lot smaller than the niagara falls and if we measure it from side to side i think we'll see that yeah this one's only about 500 feet and this would be best viewed from some photos of the waterfalls rather than google earth you can just imagine if you're standing down there you have all this water just pouring over the cliffs around you and that's another visual i really want you to keep in your mind now that we've explored three modern waterfalls let's head over to eastern washington and check out the scavlance which we've talked about in the first video in this series there we go we have the channeled scab lands right in this general area and one of the most striking features is right here we have this massive scar in the landscape amidst all the farming as we get a bit closer you can see another iconic cataract right here this we know was caused by just unprecedented floods at the end of the ice age in fact this whole area would have just been filled with water and we have this rock blade here in the middle which if the waters had continued to flow eventually this would have gotten removed as well and would have had one massive cataract but as it stands now you basically have two one over here and one over here this one is definitely the most obvious though and if we use our ruler tool let's take a look so this one seems to be over twice the size of niagara falls just to give you some sense of scale that means if you're down in here and looking at this again imagine all that water pouring over niagara falls but doubled if not substantially more than that from this angle we get a pretty good look at the canyon which was carved out during these floods and is very similar to what we see today in niagara falls we have the canyon walls on the sides and then the cataract up here at the top however at the start of these floods the cataract would have been all the way down here and then over time because the water is pouring over the edge of the rocks it's eroding it and breaking these chunks off and then over time the erosion brings you all the way back to where it is today this is where the floods ultimately ended at because there's no more erosion further back why don't we continue on with our journey today and head to canyonlake gorge in texas next canyon lake gorge was formed back in 2002 when more than 34 inches of rain fell in the watershed of the guadalupe river this rainfall set off a torrent of flood water that carved the canyonlake gorge in just a few days and that's why this is so important because in the past most geologists tend to think that erosion like this would take thousands of years to occur but we now know for a fact that this level of erosion can happen in just a few days with a fairly modest storm the reason i say that is because if we go back to the end of the ice age the storms that happened during that time frame would have been orders of magnitude larger than what we see here therefore the erosion would have been orders of magnitude larger as well and i think we really need to use the canyon lake gorge here to expand our understanding of the storms and the erosion and things that have happened here on earth rather than the slow erosion taking millions of years one drop of water one grain of sand at a time there are periods of intense accelerated erosion just like we see here thankfully for our modern civilization there really hasn't been a global disaster like there was at the end of the last ice age and this brings us to our final location today out in the desert here we are in eastern utah and you can even see from this elevation that clearly something catastrophic happened here where we have lots of erosion going on if you look closely you might even notice an interesting feature right here this is called upheaval dome and the traditional understanding was this was a salt dome uplift however with just a quick glance you can immediately tell that this is an impact crater we have the inner ring here the uplifted center and then the secondary outer ring right here and we could see very similar impact structures on the moon and elsewhere on other planets in the solar system which is odd because a lot of these scientists always try to shy away from these impact theories for whatever reason they just hate to go there i don't know why anyway that was just one interesting feature here in canyonlands national park let's move over to one of my favorite areas though the green river overlook i spent a lot of time out here when i was living in the desert out of my car and this is a great place to photograph the sunset and the night sky it wasn't until recently though that i started to understand the landscape a lot better and now that we've looked at all those cataracts today i hope that you're starting to understand what we're looking at right here i want to stress right now that this is getting a little bit out there if you will because i've done a lot of research and i can't find a single scientific paper that discusses these features therefore i'm going to lay out my own hypothesis right now and this is based off some off-record discussions with geologists and just looking at the landscape and comparing it to what we've seen today so what i would argue is that all the features we're looking at right here are actually extinct cataracts in other words these were all basically niagara falls at one time or another and if we measure some of these that'll give us a really interesting insight into what might have happened this one right here is just about the same size as niagara falls we have another one right here this one is actually a little bit bigger than the modern day niagara falls at 1 185 feet then we have of course these ones over here etc so they're all roughly a thousand feet that means rather than just one river flowing over niagara falls you would have had well at least 10 or more all happening at the same time if we change our viewpoint here there's clearly no river flowing over this location that means it must have been rainfall this is one reason why we looked at iguazu falls earlier because we saw that really breathtaking photo of down in the canyon and i'm guessing that's what this looked like during the time of the erosion you would have had water just pouring over all these canyon walls at the same time in terms of dating well we know that the most recent erosion is right here along the river as we get higher and higher above the river the erosion gets older which means the oldest erosion is at the very top of the cliffs and that's another interesting thing about the canyonlands is that based on my understanding anyway this was all the same height from here all the way out to here at one time or another but over thousands and maybe even millions of years during accelerated periods of erosion like we saw with the canyon lake gorge you most likely had intense amounts of rainfall eroding these fairly soft sandstone desert landscapes and now rather than being a continuous flat surface from here to there we have the impressive canyon lands as we look out from our viewpoint here we'd see even more look to me to be like cataracts through this area here and i hope this gives you a sense of scale we're not talking about one niagara falls we're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens all throughout this area and it's possible that everything along this white rimmed area occurred during roughly the same event i would argue most likely during the younger dryas where there would have been intense amounts of rainfall and based on our location here what i would say is that maybe a storm cloud just kind of sat right over this area for weeks or months at a time and rained out and caused all the erosion we see in this area to be clear i am not saying that all of the erosion from the tops of the cliffs down to the river was caused in a single event i would argue that the erosion around the white rim area was caused during an accelerated period of erosion most likely around the younger dryas as we move upwards towards the tops of the cliffs these could have all been eroded at different intervals over the last 2.5 million years and most likely you would have had long periods of minimal erosion followed by short intense periods of erosion during these transitions from glacial to interglacial and this is one of the things that we were investigating during the randall carlson trip back in may of 2021 we were looking for more evidence of catastrophic flooding in the canyonlands one area in particular that stood out was corona arch which is out in this area we have a very similar feature right here with uh looks kind of like the cataracts that we saw just a few minutes ago i mean that right there is almost clearly a cataract which means you have water pouring down over this area and let's measure this one as well that one's not too big it's about 500 feet if that so this is less than half the size of niagara falls still it has the same general shape of niagara falls that cataract all the way down with the cliffs and here we have another really interesting feature it's like multiple stack cataracts one on top of the other and this is where corona arch is located right here there are also some interesting caves up here in the rocks which you could argue potentially that there was water swirling around in here and if it was filled with boulders maybe it was carving out these chunks and that's what we're seeing the remnants of right now now we could sit here and argue about the dating and how long these took to form but i think everybody would be in agreement that these are caused by water flowing over the rocks and therefore a lot of rainfall must have happened in the southwest our final destination today is down in monument valley and mexican hat this is another great place to go if you want to see the erosion that's taken place in the southwest like in the goosenecks one thing i want to point out is that melee point up here and the tops of the rocks at monument valley are roughly the same height and we can tell that by the rock composition see how it's that same white rock that we're seeing right here pay attention to that we see the same thing all the way back over here at muhly point and therefore i would say that this whole landmass was continuous from here all the way down to monument valley which if we measure that out is about 20 miles i think so from here down to there yeah just about 20 miles [Music] if you're a little bit confused then basically what i'm saying is that at one point another this was all continuous at this elevation from here to here but during these accelerated periods of erosion and just slow erosion in between those events all of this material washed away and was ultimately destroyed now all that's left are these pinnacles down here in monument valley and these are just remnants of the original landscape which was all continuous through this area now you might be thinking okay well if all this erosion happened then where did all this stuff end up and that's where we're in the video today we know that all this would have gone through the colorado river down through the grand canyon which has a lot of erosion too and ultimately if we just follow this down we'll end up in california where we have a lot of sand more importantly though in mexico and i would argue that what we're seeing here in these massive sand dunes is the remnants of the american southwest we lost a lot of ground up in utah and i'm guessing eventually it all washed its way down to here and was pulverized in the floods and who knows how far the stretch is under the ocean remember during the ice age sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are today but that's just one idea i had i'm not saying that's officially what happened but something to continue to research on your own we have all this sand and it's all coming ultimately apparently from this area up here in utah and that's about all i've got for in today's video before we go i just wanted to reiterate a few important points we looked at canyon lake gorge and that showed us that in just a few days you can have really intense erosion from a fairly modest storm if we extrapolate that knowledge upwards and think back to the end of the ice age it's hard to even conceive of what was going on during those times as we saw in the scab lands of washington there were massive sheep floods racing over the entire landscape and those were most likely coming from the melting glaciers themselves however there would have definitely been major storms all across the planet and what i would argue is based on the erosion we're seeing here in utah one of those storms sat over this area for an extended amount of time just like what happened in canyon lake gorge but this was orders of magnitude more intense and the best way to see that erosion is here in canyonlands national park we have what appear to me to be a bunch of cataracts throughout the area just like niagara falls and when we measure all of these cataracts they all seem to be roughly the same size as niagara falls as well if not a little bit bigger but there's not one of them there's dozens if not hundreds all throughout the canyonlands so you can start to imagine that this would have been a catastrophic event and it would have washed away anything that was here before over the last few hundred and thousand years though things have really calmed down and the erosion has been largely preserved because there hasn't been hardly any rainfall since then and if the floods that caused all these cataracts were fairly recent again i'd say 13 000 years ago or sooner then all that material probably got washed out through the colorado river through the grand canyon and ultimately down into mexico down here that makes sense to me anyway as i mentioned before i'm kind of going out on a limb here because there's been no official research that i can see that's been done on these canyons and nobody's really even willing to go there and that's one of the things i wanted to do in this series is explore these interesting ideas with the help of modern technology because now the average person has really powerful tools at their command where they can actually see the erosion that took place in the past whether that's the national map viewer the lidar imaging or google earth but that's all i've got for you today thanks for watching and i'll see you in another video you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 129,167

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Id: uGaFN8TRT4w

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022