Catastrophe and Cartography - Ice Age Floods Visualized

it's been almost four months now without a single clear night here in washington and obviously that doesn't give me a lot of chance to do astrophotography which is why i haven't really been too active here on youtube lately hopefully you've had some clear nights where you're at and you've been getting some great shots in the meantime though i've been doing a lot of research on some different topics these last few months and one of the most interesting was just some basic geology and geography and that's going to be the focus of our video today i wanted to show you some of the amazing landscapes here with the help of this map from the usgs this is their national map viewer i think i'll have a link for in the video description below if you want to follow along but with the help of their elevation tinted hill shade try saying that three times fast this allows us to really see the underlying landscapes that would otherwise be obscured by foliage and vegetation and buildings and all that and once you start to understand how much the planet has changed especially in the last 15 000 years this brings a whole new dimension to what you're looking at with that said i'd highly recommend you spend some time if you're interested in this kind of thing looking up randall carlson on youtube he's kind of the leader in this field and he's got a lot of really detailed videos probably 100 hours worth here on youtube at least that gets into the really important details of everything we're going to look at today in this video though i just want to focus on the basic things we can actually see here in the map as you'll start to notice you don't need to have a degree in geology or geography to see what's going on here and the key thing you want to keep in mind as we're looking at the map is that all of these landscapes were radically altered between about 15 to 10 000 years ago during this time frame the global climate got both considerably warmer and then considerably colder and warmer again indicating multiple catastrophic events again i would refer you to randall carlson's videos for more information but essentially what happened is that about 12 000 13 000 years ago all of canada practically was covered in over a mile thick of ice in some spots almost two miles thick of ice and all of that ice melted fairly rapidly due to some type of global cataclysm some people are saying it's a comet which would make a lot of sense others think it has something to do with the sun i would argue it's probably both based on the evidence so far and as you're going to see here we can actually see the effects of this catastrophic climate change just by looking at the map i'd also recommend checking out the comet research group's website that we're looking at now they've got a lot of cogent information here that really explains the whole comet impact theory and it really is a great starting point for your own research [Music] anyway now would be a good time to get back to the map i'll just start with some areas that i'm actually familiar with having lived in them and traveled through them over the years and one of the most popular is the one that randall really focuses on in fact we did a workshop with him in september we went out to the scab lands and he showed us around and we got to see these landscapes in person the footage you're watching now was captured by two of the guys on our trip milo and casey and i'd highly recommend watching their video if you want to learn more about these landscapes we can see right here we're in the border of washington up here in oregon down here we have what's called wallula gap the green is the more depressed area which means there was a lot of erosion there and this was all caused by the massive flood waters coming off of the melting ice sheets up in canada this video we're watching now is one of the best examples to showcase the scale of these floods and if you go through and read some of the native american myths from this region they all talk about this massive wall of water and these floods and this gives you the perfect context for what they're talking about [Music] and you have to keep in mind that this water is filled with sediment and rocks and boulders and trees and even massive icebergs carrying boulders with them and all this stuff reaches this narrow little constriction the water starts to back up and pond and that's what we see over here and also out over this way then as it pulsed through this narrow little gap it continued down the columbia river gorge all the way out to the pacific ocean near astoria in fact there was so much water coming through here that this whole region here down to eugene was kind of like a back flood so he had so much water just pulled all the way down to here and then eventually went out believe it or not they even found a chunk of a meteorite in the willamette valley that we just looked at and as they mentioned on wikipedia which i'm not saying is reliable but they say right here that it is the largest meteorite found in the united states there was no impact crater at the site which led them to believe that the meteorite landed in canada or montana and was transported as a glacial erratic during the missoula floods at the end of the last ice age just as we talked about as you're starting to visualize all this in your mind you can imagine that there's millions of icebergs floating on these flood waters and inside of these icebergs some have large boulders and in this case a meteorite this video here was taken in new hampshire and i thought it was a great visual in regards to the wallula gap floods because at woolula gap that's where a lot of the water got stuck at and began to back up so this is a great visual to show you how when the water is filled with ice not to mention the trees and rocks and icebergs and all that it really changes the dynamics of those floods and this just helps to give you a sense of scale if we look at this video here this also reveals an important point when that narrow gap got constricted and filled with icebergs and rocks and trees eventually the pressure got so intense that the floods started to back up and go in the reverse direction there's actually stratigraphic proof that shows that this happened during those ice age floods the current of the rivers reversed because there is so much water trying to get through a narrow area and then as these icebergs and rocks and trees get forced through that gap every so often the water gushes down these floods clear out a little bit but then there's another constriction and this keeps happening over and over again which leaves us a lot of really interesting evidence throughout the scab lands if we follow these original features further north we can see that they tend to go straight up into canada and this is an area where we have this confrontation between the more uniformitarian mindset and the catastrophist mindset the current mainstream theory is that all of the erosion we're seeing in the channel scab lands was caused by glacial lake missoula catastrophically flooding out what they say is that glacial lake missoula would fill up with water in fact so much water that would be the size of lake erie and lake ontario combined just to give you some idea and when all this water would fill up it would get stuck at the purcell trench load near sandpoint idaho eventually the pressure would become so strong that it would burst through the ice dam and then flood out through the scab lands and cause all the erosion and the main reason they came up with this idea is because we can see similar events happening in iceland today but there's two big problems with this theory the first is that they're saying this event happened over 40 times in a row in the span of a few thousand years that means glacier lake missoula would have to fill all the way up the ice dam would come down block it off it would burst through the ice dam is now gone the lake drains the lake fills up again the ice dam reforms and this just happens over and over and over again and when you look through the climate history and just look at the physics it doesn't make a lot of sense the other problem is that they tend to ignore all of these ice sheets north of the scab lands for some reason and they still attribute all of this erosion for the most part to glacial lake missoula not the ice sheets due north of it melting and catastrophically flooding out and this is why this map is so great because we can see with our own eyes that there's all these mountain valleys that must have been filled with melting water and ice pouring down into the scab lands if we trace all of these valleys back to their central location we find a very odd flattened out area in the midst of the rockies this is where prince george is at today and this would lead us to believe that maybe something happened here during the ice age therefore the logical assumption would be that there was some maybe some sort of impact right here into the ice sheets and again you can imagine if there's a mild thing of ice you're not going to have a big crater beneath that necessarily as the ice would absorb most of that impact and then melt and this is one of the things that randall has spent the last 20 years investigating and trying to find evidence that would suggest that a lot of these scab-lance floods started up near prince george getting stuck at certain points and creating these massive ponds and then flowing out to the pacific ocean another interesting side note is that the channeled scab lands we've been talking about here is mainly composed of basalt this basalt was extruded from the earth i think 16 to 10 million years ago somewhere in that range and that alone is mind-boggling because as you're driving through these landscapes you're seeing the erosion but it's happening on top of this really hard volcanic rock that's just piled for hundreds if not thousands of feet high it's really hard to comprehend what you're seeing and that leads me to an interesting theory about how the yellowstone super volcano formed one of the leading theories that i've heard is that the yellowstone caldera was caused millions of years ago by a very high energy impact with an asteroid this asteroid must have been very dense and moving at a really high speed just straight into the earth think of it like getting shot with a rifle then as the earth began to bleed from this wound it was extruding all this magma through this region right here in southern idaho speaking of which the craters of the moon national monument is a great place to stop if you are traveling through southern idaho and essentially what happened is after our earth got shot by this asteroid if you will the continental crust moved very slowly over millions of years and that left this scar right here the wound itself i don't think is technically moved because it's part of the lower portion of the earth and now it resides under yellowstone and that's what all that talk about the super volcano blowing up could relate to is that it had its origins and another catastrophic impact that's just one interesting theory that i've heard that explains this feature right here and right now we're looking at something that most people couldn't even conceive of the power of this one singular event and all the erosion it's caused in this little corner of northwestern america and southwestern canada but if we go over here we'll see similar original features you know if you've ever been to a stream or the beach you can almost start to see how the water just came pouring down these valleys and carved these immense channels that nowadays we can't even see without the help of maps like this and in this region they had what was called glacial lake agassi which again if i'm not mistaken was basically a giant melt water pond at one point or another that drained out ultimately down through the mississippi river which really seemed to have taken most of the flooding from central and eastern united states and of course up into canada and if we zoom in here you can see things a bit better just all the different flood channels coming down converging on the mississippi river and then pouring out into the gulf of mexico another thing to keep in mind is that we're only seeing the most recent events because if you're going to have a massive flood like this on a continent-wide scale it's going to completely obliterate a lot of the previous features of the landscape just from the sheer erosion if we go to the adirondacks up here which is a great place to explore we can also see that there is clearly a lot of water flowing through what is now lake champlain another factor to consider is isostasy this is when you have miles of ice pressing down on the earth the ice melts and now the earth is rebounding and actually rising in elevation this would also affect how the water was moving in and out during these chaotic times also the finger lakes which are well known these were potentially caused by if you imagine you had the ice sheet kind of ending right here and then you would have these very high pressure sub-glacial flows underneath the ice and this would over time carve out those finger lakes in fact just north of the finger lakes we have what are called drumlands and these are a pretty interesting erosional feature the drumlins indicate that again this was all under the ice and as the water was flowing underneath the glaciers it was subject to very high pressure and it caused these really interesting landforms that are still visible today with the help of these maps and we see almost identical drumlands over near where i'm living now in washington notice how they just kind of fill up this whole area and give us an idea of where the southern edge of the ice sheets used to be so here's the drumlins in new york let's take a look at them over in washington next right now we're looking at the puget sound area seattle's up over here olympia would be down here tacoma and the drumlins here aren't as noticeable i guess you could say but when we get a little bit better resolution we'll be able to see that this whole area shows these vertical streaks which again are the drumlins associated with really high pressure water running underneath the glaciers and in fact this whole area really showcases what happened again about 12 000 to 11 000 years ago with that catastrophic melting another thing you want to keep in mind is that sea levels were 400 feet lower during the ice age and the reason for that is because a lot of the water was locked up in these gigantic ice sheets covering canada as those miles and miles of ice melted that was enough to raise global sea level about 400 feet in a surprisingly short amount of time and we can't forget about the ice sheets in northern europe there's a lot of evidence that shows that these catastrophically melted as well probably during the same time frame [Music] we're jumping around again this time we're in the border of arizona and utah we have the grand canyon right here and this is arguably one of the most interesting areas to notice the erosion if you know what you're looking at i did another workshop with randall in may and this was a southwestern trip and we went from flagstaff arizona all the way up to moab and back and along the way we saw really clear evidence of massive rainfall that scoured this desert landscape most likely around the time of the younger dryas it doesn't show up too well here on the tinted hillshade map but i'll probably do a separate video if anybody's interested where i show you the photographic and google map evidence that really drives home these points of just unfathomable rainfall in the desert of course 12 000 years ago the climate of the southwest was probably quite a bit different than it is today and if we go up into canada we can see the final remains of the flooding as the ice sheets melted away again we have these streamlined erosional features but these are massive you know this isn't just some little thing at the beach these are just really huge areas of canada just completely stripped through and nobody would have any idea because now it's just covered in forests and prairies and plains and you can't really make sense of it unless you see it with the tinted hill shade which is another nice benefit of our modern technology even up over here we can see the remains of these flood areas reaching out and just taking out everything along with it i think it's pretty obvious that we had multiple catastrophic events happen from the balling allorod to the younger driest and all the evidence backs that up from a mass extinction of animals across the globe to sea levels rising 400 feet to the mile thick ice sheets across all of canada melting within just a few hundred years clearly that's going to have some impacts on the planet and the erosion that we see here would obviously tie right into that but that's really all i wanted to talk about today i really just wanted to let you guys know this resource is here because i personally think it's fascinating just come in here and spend however long you want just looking at all the erosion maybe where you live and get an idea of what might have happened during these chaotic times and if you want to learn more about this i'll have links to randall carlson's page he's really the the main guy talking about this from what i've seen and he does a really good job of laying it all out well i hope you guys enjoyed this radically different video and i might do one or two more videos if you guys are interested showing you some of my photos that i've taken living on the road the last few years and now that i have some more context to put these really cool landscapes of the southwest in with the global changes that we've experienced within the last 15 000 years so thanks for watching and i'll see you guys hopefully in another video [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 1,619,193

Keywords:

Id: nCBEBIBsJzM

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/dw_calif]

That was interesting and led me to this.

7:01 Texas and then 9:25, very interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGaFN8TRT4w