[Music] so I've got a question for you did humans witness the Ice Age floods is that a crazy question by the Pacific Northwest Missoula floods you've heard of those Native Americans I think it's a reasonable question and here's why I don't think it's a dumb question that humans witness at least some of the last ice age floods we have some new dates for the ice age floods and I want to share some of those dates with you tonight we also have some new dates from archaeological sites around the Pacific Northwest and those dates are starting to overlap the archaeological sites that are old and the Ice Age flood dates that are young now I gotta be careful I'm not saying we have direct evidence yet of Native Americans dealing with the Ice Age floods whatever dealing with I don't know if that means watching or I mean god forbid it coming down a I mean you can fill in the blanks and we have no evidence of that directly but as we continue to get more and more days and we continue to have more archaeological finds I think it's just a matter of time before we have that direct evidence so we're in the ballpark with humans and at least the youngest of the ice age flaws but this is not an archeological talk I don't know anything about archaeology I've got a few slides to show you of some famous digs in Washington towards the end of tonight but I have a geology person and I do know about the Ice Age floods and I would like to spend tonight talking about dates of the Ice Age flood the time was dating the Ice Age floods and this lecture was inspired by two relatively new scientific papers that came out just in the last three years one by a guy who's been working on flood geology for 50 years his name is Richard wait 50 years been thinking about it for five decades and he still throat important work so his paper is based on things called slack water sediments and we'll talk about that and some dates coming from slack water sediments another paper is from a gal right out of college just finished her PhD and she's a brand new technique she's using a brand new technique using flood erratic boulders that were deposited by the Ice Age flows and the good news is andreas paper and Ramallah sisters named Andrea's paper and Richards paper essentially agree even though we have two very different workers from different generations using different techniques and yet a basic Ice Age flood story has emerged with some dates and so before we're done with the chalkboard before we go to the visuals I want to share some of that basic chronology very basic and there's room for improvement but we've got some dates to put together okay now the Ice Age floods if you're a rookie here we're talking about water from Montana cruising across Washington and going all the Pacific Ocean and many of those floods not just happening once it's almost impossible to believe but there is no debate in science about whether these floods happen or not all you got to do is go out and see these places I challenge you to go up right up the middle of a Coulee forward and look at the size of that Canyon there's no River in the canyon by the way and actually realize that that thing formed quickly by ice age floods or go to dry falls you've heard of that go to the top of dry Falls and see these enormous potholes that are 50 feet deep that are drilled directly into the bench bedrock of that material the water did that or if that doesn't turn me on you can go to places where there's rocks boulders that are stacked 600 feet high and the landform is ten miles long that's East Wenatchee a gigantic flood bar there's no other way to explain that except they have Ice Age floods come down to Columbia so in science there is no debate that these floods happened but this business about dating floods getting a date getting a specific date or some of these floods that's a tougher sell and we're in progress we're in the progress we're kind of developing these dates as we go and I want to mainly show you how we come up with these days these numbers for some of these Ice Age floods the main theme I want to expand on here tonight is we need to go where the floodwaters were quiet if we want how do you date a flood I mean it's a bunch of water that went across this map thousands of years ago how you supposed to figure out when that happened that waters gone the answer is if you can go to the quiet water and I'll show your spots and we'll look at the evidence there's things in that quiet water that we can define I'll expand on that so we're not going to the sexy places tonight we're not going to track dry Falls and these other huge coolies where the water is loud and it's it's tearing up the ground that's the stuff that draws all of us this ice age flood story but we're not going there there's too energetic for us tonight we want to look at the causes that deposits of the Ice Age flood so we can't even answer basic questions like how many floods were there was there two more there - floods five floods 40 floods 89 floods a hundred floods folks of you that know I've done a lot of reading about these floods recognize those numbers those numbers are all over the place where do those numbers come from can we decide at the floods when did they happen that they happen 15,000 years ago or between 18,000 you get it there's all these numbers out there where do the numbers come from and where are we going with eventually trying to be very specific about these flood events so we're going to quiet water tonight don't mean a disappointed we're not going to the loud angry water we're going to the quiet wine so with that said let's go ahead and use this map of the Pacific Northwest and talk about where this quiet logger is where we're going to earn our money tonight so the first place obviously is a beautiful Ice Age Lake its compilation Lake Missoula and it's the source of many probably not all but many of the Ice Age floods of the Pacific Northwest why is glacial Lake Missoula there well this lobe of the ice sheet called the Purcell trench will the Purcell no we'll just put a key there the reason collection like Missoula is there is because the Purcell lobe is blocking the met water and not letting it leave Montana so we have an ice dam a construction this is the Ice Sheet coming across the border from Canada and this Purcell lobe is creating this late glacial lake Mizzou more quiet watering there's another one of these links GLC glacial lake columbia it also exists because we have one of these lobes of ice in this case it's called the okanagan law in North Central Washington so Okanagan lobe think of it as a barrier a roadblock and not allowing this water to go anywhere same with the persona got it think of those two lakes like bathtubs and we're going to fill the bathtub with water because there's nowhere that water to go and there's a plug in the drain of the bathtub there's no way for the water to drain out of the lake both for glacial lake Missoula and glacial lake Columbia we're finally going to have a flood if we break through the Purcell Ice lobe we bust up the ice dam and we hit that water surge and in the case of glacial lake Missoula oftentimes not every time but often times the water of glacial lake Missoula would spill into this next bathtub and overfill a bathtub called glacial lake Columbia and then that water is going to cruise over Eastern Washington those of the Ice Age floods this is the water that's eventually going to get the Pacific Ocean okay there's a third Lake that's often overlooked and it's big for us tonight it's down here in southern Washington I'll save it like this and I'll put ll this is Lake Lewis tri-cities Yakima other places Walla Walla Lewiston Idaho Lake Lewis so this lake is different for a couple of reasons first of all we're not calling it glacial Lake Louis because it's not honored water from going up against an ice sheet in other words the dam is not the ice sheet or too far south the dam for Lake Lewis is a ridge called the horse heaven hills they're still there and there's a gap in the horse heaven hills called will look out so instead of a bathtub with a cork or a plug and the drain that cut the trip for understanding like Lewis is it's a path with and rain we're never going to plug whether the gap there's nothing to plug so Lake Louis is different than these guys because Lake Lewis is only going to be there for a few days we're going to have a flood we're going to get water leaving these lakes we're going to have a very temporary Lake Lewis just for a few days because of an open drain the water is threaded through a little gap in that water it's coming down the Columbia River over Portland and going through the Pacific Ocean I'll show you the evidence for why we know that Lake Lewis is short-lived compared to these other links which are long-lived okay even the beginners did this story at least now have been introduced to the basic ideas of these floods and again I'm not doing any circle in here because I want to keep this nice and open and I'm never going to circle some of these things because it's an open question but I do have some specifics for you and I'm excited to get to that soon enough the ice eights by the way is really the last 2.6 million years of time we're still in the Ice Age we still have ice on the planet and so we really have a full 2.6 million years to work with if we really want to talk about potential for when these ice age floods happen our story however that I'm sharing tonight it's going to be confined to the last 20,000 years more coming on that as well so these are the two pieces of field evidence that I want to share with you tonight and both of them need some explanation what the hell's this I think I know what those are you say those are boulders out in the desert but how are you going to use those to figure out where an Ice Age flood happened okay let's get the energy is outstanding in the room we've got you know you can hear a pin drop we've got 300 people in the room and you're well behaved damn it just well be here I appreciate that energy so let's start with slack water sediments let's go to Lake Lewis and try to understand what slack water sedimentation all right so let's make a sunny day and let's have the land down here and here's the top of Lake Lewis okay we had a bunch of water hundreds of feet of water sitting why is the water there we had a flood we had water from glacial lake Missoula breached the ice dam dumped into glacial lake Columbia most times that water spill south and then we get this third lake why because we've got this narrow slot this with a little bit cap and all that water can't get through that gap at once so the water has the weight its turn and the water is backing up behind for Seven Hills and we'll again that's the one with the open drain and it just last for a few days even though there's just a few days there's a concept that we need to explain slack water sediments ready here we go when this water first shows up to form like Lewis its chocolate milk it's brown why that's a key point why is it brown well the floods left Montana they're cruising over Eastern Washington and they're picking up sortable they're picking up a lot of they're picking up some rocks too and some other things but they're mostly picking up soil silt the consistency of kitchen flour and when the water is moving quickly 60 miles an hour let's say that that silt that soil is held in suspension and even when the water first stops it's still chocolate milk because this stuff is all floating some silk or if you like I'm here with mint I'm the public servant now it's chocolate milk but as Lake Lewis water sits there hour after hour after Oh what's going to change I think the color of the chocolate milk is going to change what's going to happen our silk that's going to start dropping isn't it we're gonna have gravity pull that still down and over the course of I don't know take your pick a day two days three days five days nobody really knows but the point is that with each passing day that water Mike Lewis is going to get more and more clear because the sediment is going to drop out and what we're left with I do it like this is a deposit we have taken that soil upstream picked it up moved it by the floodwater and now it's in late Louis and it's being redeposited that's what a slack water sediment layer is I'll do just slack okay a slack water sediment layer so even if we finally then drain the water away and where's it going it's going through we'll look at it's coming down the Columbia River Gorge and out to sea even though the water is now gone we're left with a layer of sediment but what are we supposed to do with the how supposed to get a date from that just a bunch of simply a bunch of it get your flour ok well I'll put that on hold for a second we're going to go to a place near Walla Walla Washington it's called Burlingame ravine it's a famous place and there are 14 I don't have time to draw them all there are 40 of these slack water sediment layers one on top of another I'll show you video clips and photos from this place in just a bit I'm not much of an artist but I did mean to show that the layers of slack water sediment at Burlingame ravine near Walla Walla are the thickest at the bottom and they get thinner and thinner as you go up and we're going to see that with many of these deposits across the northwest by the way we're going to hear next we're going there next and there's gonna be slack water sediments in those lakes as well with the same finding upward path okay so we've got 40 slack water sediment layers and I just explained that that's one flood event at least I intended to explain that so if we have 40 slack water sediments at well I guess we had 40 floods that's where that number comes from so why are we overthinking this that's that's it that must be the answer there were 40 floods well there's other places didn't have more than 40 there's other places that have less than 40 and the real trouble is we can't find specific dates from the stack in other words we don't have a method yet to actually get an age for each of these slack water sediment layers it's just a bunch of kitchen flour but in the case that Burlingame ravine we're lucky if you count down 11 slack water set up at layers from the top at Burlingame ravine I know this isn't 11 but I'm gonna put it in between the 11th and the 12th one down there's a fine layer of volcanic ash that was deposited after one slack water sediment after one flood but before the next line well that's awfully helpful because as a geologist we can go and sample that ash and send it to a laboratory and they can give us some chemistry isotopic signature a finger a chemical fingerprint of that ash and tell us what volcano erupted and more importantly we can figure out when that eruption heaven so that we can know where we are in the story well at Burlingame ravine near Walla Walla the 11th layer down that is Mount st. Helens ash but not from 1980 I don't remember 11 floods since 1980 beer instead this is the mount st. helens s tephra that geologists have big letters for each of these things and the date for this st. Helens ash is sixteen thousand three hundred years ago sixteen thousand three hundred years ago so there we go we've got a date now what does the date mean well we know we have some Ice Age flooding 11 times after sixteen thousand three hundred years ago and twenty-eight times before and that's all we can say we only have one time marker in the stack of Florida we're starting to get the picture that's that was done in the 1970s by Richard wait there's other places that I'll take you that are similar to this Zillah Granger the white bluffs Lewiston Idaho I'll show you a visual leave all those places that are related to Lake Lewis but let's late leave that Lake and go up to glacier lake Columbia to save time I did glacier Lake Columbia before you showed up and so just for a moment here I'm gonna put this black chalkboard in front of us sorry so now we're leaving Lake Lewis and we're going up to glacier lake Columbia this is the one that was dammed by the Okanagan though this is basically upriver from Grand Coulee Dam where the Spokane River Valley and the Columbia River Valley come together and this is a famous place again I say famous famous among you know a few geologists who you know maybe pelegrin interested these places on occasion so this is work done in the sand pile arm of Lake Roosevelt by the name Bryan Atwater and that's a recognizable name to many of you that's that after he did this work in the early 1980s started working on the ghost forest and the whole mega quick thing on the coast so he has done important work in more than one discipline so here we are in the bottom of glacial lake Colombia and not only has bright out water been working here but in the last 10 years Michele Hansen from Canada I think Saskatchewan has done some work in these same glacial lake Colombia sediments what have they found they found 89 of these next 89 slack water sediments instead of the 40 we had down by Walla Walla again the layers are getting a little bit thinner as we go up so human nature says well I guess we've got you know our 40 down in Walla Walla I must be 40 of these 80 done but we need proof we need days we need to be able to correlate and there are no ashes at all our friends and outside Helen said s ash is gone not there I shouldn't say go on it probably never fell that far north in Washington so do we have any dates we do at water in the early 1980s pulled a twig or a stick out of one of this lack water sediment layers and Michele Hansen a few years ago found some plant detritus I guess that means little fragments of leaves or something I'm not quite sure but the point is they both have organic carbon with it so we could do some radiocarbon dating from the stick and from the plant fragments and the date that that water got from this stick I don't know how many layers up I should know sorry fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety years radiocarbon years now let's pause and realize that there's a difference between radiocarbon years and calendar years that adds to the confusion when you're reading books or articles or seeing a program on TV about the Ice Age flood when you hear these days your first thought should be on the radiocarbon here or calendar years because they're different and it'll have time to talk about why they're different and the carbon cycle etc things like that asketh fear economy but i do want to say there's a simple way to convert these dates from radiocarbon to calendar years so in yellow brian's twig is 17700 calendar years and we have calendar years here from our volcanic ash Michele her plat detritus carbon 14 dates thirteen thousand four hundred we recalibrate those carbon dates those radiocarbon years two calendar years in Reston cheese mouse so they've got two things here now we've got glacial Lake Columbia we've got Lake Lewis we've got three precious dates out of all those black water sediment layers again that's where these dates are coming from there's a brand-new technique OSL dating OS l stands for optically stimulated luminescence I had to read it I must not know that much about it and that's true but the hope is that OS dealt dating can give us a date for each layer it's a surface exposure dating method that I don't really want to talk about because I don't know much about it there are SL dates now but they're not very reliable that's the general consensus it's tough to put a lot of work in some of these OSL days so for now I'm not going to dive into the USL days we just got those three days let me pick up the pace and do one more thing we've got to go to glacial lake Columbia I should erase that date 16300 so quickly let's go to glacial lake Missoula so now we've crossed over into Montana we're in the floor of that third leg the source of many but not all of the Ice Age floods what am I going to draw you know what I'm gonna draw I'm gonna draw the same pattern slack water sediment layers getting thinner and thinner as we go up and this section is famous again among geologists thread along i-90 you've passed it every time you drive on i-90 to Missoula it's called nine mile it's a nine mile road there's a nine-mile exit and when I show you the photos I'm sure you've noticed it even if you didn't know what you were looking at so these are the things slack water sediments at the bottom of glacier Lake Missoula this is easy because there's nothing today we have how many we have 34 slack water sediments at nine mile Michele Hansen did this work as well in 2011 the only thing we can date is the very top of the exposure I should use white because it's another volcanic ash layer you like okay we're in luck Mount st. Helens ask our old friend then we help us out it's not the different volcanic ash with a different age from a different volcano this is Glacier Peak an active volcano north of Stevens Pass who maybe don't know it it's not very visible from civilization but it's a beautiful cone volcano just like the others and the Glacier Peak ash which is also a very useful time marker for us is 13,600 saying Helens at 16300 Glacier Peak ash 13600 so what's my point couple points from the slack water sediments at these three locations and again I've got a lot of visuals to visit all these places here are the two main points dates that we do know if the ice age floods are primarily coming from these dateable horizons within the slack water sediment stack and secondly we're having a hell of a time correlating these beds between the location early on 30 40 years ago it looked like he must be the same beds as these and must be look at the same as those guys over there they all fine upwards can't we just correlate everything and be good but with these dates coming in it's clear we can't correlate bed for bed okay we're changing gears thank you for that energy we're going to go to these fluttery attics and talk very briefly about them because I think the visuals are going to work for this but I can help you out so we're switching from Richard wait and this particular feat which we were just talking about - Andrea pelvis the gal right out of PhD school very nice gal we're gonna have meet both of them with truck interview clips coming in a bit and so Andrea didn't invent this technique but she has been using it Johnstone is another guy from the University of Washington has been using this and so in this picture we're going to talk about a people rock and that rock has clearly moved tens of miles maybe a hundred miles maybe more than a hundred miles and get this location the floods the Ice Age floods brought that Boulder in you might go how's that even possible that's a huge bowler bigger than oh I don't know I think this guy is but it's big well quite often these boulders were wrapped that in on blocks of ice I'll explain with the visuals but the point is they were definitely brought in by the Ice Age floods okay so Andrea and others Johnstone say I think I can figure out how long that rock has been sitting there so as a geologist what do you do do you just go and sample a piece of the rock and send it to a lab and get an age that would be the age of the rock right that would be the age let's say this is a grant this is a white granite with a bunch of dark brown basalt lava rock okay and the closest was the white granite in bedrock form is 100 miles on mat so if we just get an age from the ground we've got an age for the friggin granite like the Magnus but the volcano 100 million years ago but I was not going to help us we want the age of what we want the age of the flood when did the water bring this thing in and drop them the water is gone but how many years had had that rock been sitting here alright give me a chance now we need Sun again and we need a lot of solar radiation or cosmic Renee's coming from the Sun every minute of every hour of every day of every year of every century and we're going to have cosmic rays bombarded the surface of that bull so what Andrea and John Stone are doing is they're carefully looking for just the right Boulder it looks like the boulders been moved by a bobcat or something and you're not going to use it you've got to find a boulder that has been sitting still pristine since the Ice Age and that sounds like a stretch but many of them have no signs of movement since the Ice Age getting extant we need a good looking surface on that Boulder on that flood around can't have a bunch of Lincoln on it can't have some other stuff getting away so a nice clean surface now John or Andrea Andrea for our purposes tonight it's been a sample just the upper portion of that Boulder and she's going to set that sample into the lab and they're gonna look for isotopes that are in that surface of that Boulder if I got to go to the notes I'm out of my element again oh no I'm intended but I'm going to talk about that's so close not really so I'll make this quick I don't want to get bogged down but not only do we want to have the right Boulder we want to have some quartz minerals we want to have the mineral quartz exposed on the surface of this Boulder this is surface exposure dating the process that I'm describing if you want a more formal term cosmogenic radionuclides dating cosmogenic radionuclides so I'll cut to the chase as we expose the surface and those quarters to solar radiation to cosmic rays we're slowly going to convert some oxygen-16 to a daughter isotope called Karelian 10 and the silica star this is si the silica that's in the quartz quartz is silicon and oxygen that's in the silica in the court is going to radioactively decay into some aluminum aluminum 26 so in the lab you're going to measure how much brilliant how much aluminum how much silicon how much oxygen is in that course and if we know the half-life for the decay of those two radioactive pairs we can calculate the age and you're like okay I think I got what you said but I don't know if I believe I'll cut to the chase the real change the dates that Andrea and John are getting and the dates that Richard is getting agreed so if one method was just absolute baloney we wouldn't have any sort of general agreement but we've got multiple aratus from multiple locations multiple samples multiple days and the locations of those dates work beautifully with field relations and other things that Richard another field geologist put together so the story that emerging is exciting Bay on these two main types of evidence and it's these two deposits that hold a lot of promise for the future before we quit with the chalkboard and just have a feast visually I would like to quickly I'm going to leave that matter I'm going to quickly draw a cartoon of the story that has now emerged the chronology that involved places that you know in love Grand Coulee Drive flaws when answered Moses Cooley Quincy Basin can you say anything about what those floods happened we can I wouldn't waste your time with all this data if there wasn't a payoff here is the payoff I don't know how it will feel but here's the payoff so I'm gonna draw cartoon of a cartoon how about that this is really going nuts now crazy drawing Montana Idaho Oregon Washington these are both the same place so I'm doing it this way because oh shoot hang on I need some space to draw the story so I want to do 18,000 18,000 yes sixteen thousand fourteen thousand thirteen thousand three hundred there's a lot that can be talked about with this emerging story I'm choosing to do it this way four chapters to our story it involves our two lows our Okanagan lobe and our persona and where the Ice Age floods are going to travel based on the position of those two lobes are you ready yeah all right 18,000 you know what I need one more thing I got to put the Columbia River in here so here's one at your Washington here's Seoul and Washington your Spokane Washington the Spokane River is coming in okay Stewart it goes like this based on evidence it's not a story without evidence based on the evidence we just talked about the dates from the erratics and this lack water sediment the Purcell lobe was in place before the Okanagan lobe got in place so 18,000 years ago we have a per solo therefore we have a glacial lake Missoula but we do not have an Okanagan little in Washington so therefore we don't have a glacial lake Columbia so do we have ice age floods 18,000 years ago we do where did the water go because the Okanagan boat was not in place our floods of water from Montana are going to find their way to the Columbia River and follow the Columbia River all the way to the ocean so to keep track of this we have big floods big floods 18,000 years ago and Wenatchee is wet we have floods coming right over the city of Lenexa ok when at you wet 18,000 years ago because the Okanagan globe is not in place yet Braddock's from Andrea etc backing this stuff next step now the Okanagan globe is going to grow and we're going to get both lobes just as I drew them over there Okanagan lobe is now in place and the Purcell flow is in place we are now roughly 16,000 years ago so now we do the daisy chain thing I was talking about before if we break through the ice tea from glacial lake Missoula that's going to dump into glacial lake Columbia glacier Lake Columbia that water can't go anywhere why is the Okanagan logos in place so the daisy-chan I'm talking about is drained the bathtub overfill this bathtub and now we've got Ice Age floods coming down the Chi Palouse tract which is a straight shot from Spokane down to tri-cities basically to Eastern Washington and we started having major floods coming down the Grand Coulee over dry flaws why the Okanagan what was in the wedding when Nancy and Chelan are dry during this time we can't get any Ice Age floods coming down this Northwest route because the Okanagan plastun we keep going 14,000 years ago the Purcell lobe is gone glacial lake Missoula is gone we still have glacial lake Columbia or 14,000 years ago and we have one last major flood why because we finally have enough water in glacial lake Columbia to breach it we're preaching the Okanagan vote for the first time it was the persona that kept getting broken and rebuilt broken and rebuilt but we never did breach the Okanagan loan according to these dates until 14,000 years ago the last major flood in the Pacific Northwest is 14,000 years ago where we have water coming down the Columbia I'll show you the giant ripples at Westar that are the best evidence of this 14 thousand year flood coming down the ground there is a fourth but it's almost like a little corner if you're a music fan the little coma that right at the end of our performers it's a small flood weight puts the date at 13,300 but this time we don't have the Okanagan anymore we don't have the purcell anymore we don't have anymore and we have one left flood a small flood coming down the Columbia unclear where the sources Waits got some ideas but let's just leave it like that I gotta say two more things before we go with the chalkboard if you're a Canadian geologist you are convinced that not all the water is coming from Montana and that sometimes major floods are going to be coming directly across the border from underneath the Okanagan low and particularly this place our role with Moses Cooley which I'm really not talking about here the other thing I want to say briefly is that there is another floor we can put on this man it's a flood that happened once but it came from a lake in Utah called Lake Bob I can do it over here Lake Bonneville which sat in much of western Utah where the Great Salt Lake is now and seventeen thousand four hundred years ago the Bonneville flood one flood totally different than our floods we were talking about today it's going to break over Red Rock pass the water is going to go over my in-laws house and Pocatello Idaho going to go down the Snake River Twin Falls Boise of one major flood the Bonneville floods going to come through Hells Canyon and it also is going to follow the Columbia River Gorge it's worth mentioning the bottom in a flood because it's going to help us date some of our slack water sediments in the Lewiston Idaho area you're known for washing that they held home center in the middle of the state wonderful yes we had a bunch of ice it covered much of Canada across the word back at this time channeled scablands yes Ice Age floods glacier Lake Missoula bursting through the Purcell low here's the Okanagan low everything is on this map at full position let's look quickly at the bedrock basalt lava rock is the bedrock of eastern Washington layer upon layer 300 separate layers these lavas were 15 million years old long long long before the Ice Age way older than the Ice Age by more than 15 more than 14 million years the lavas came out of deep cracks the lavas flooded the surface and Eastern Washington would have looked like this at each of these cracks these fissures beautiful floods of lava this is Iceland today but we need a much larger scale to imagine the flood basalts of these turn Washington when you have one of these 300 layers being formed you have a very watery light that's important to us tonight but it's lava watery like lava flooding the surface and crystallinity so each time we have a flood 15 million years ago long before the ice date we have a featureless plain like this in places that stack of lavas has more than two miles thick in some places it's more than three miles thick and then spending time with us because this is the rock we're going to erode at places like dry falls where the Ice Age floodwaters are angry with their loud now one other thing to mention is that many places but we saw lavas are no longer flat there worked into ridges the ridges of Central Washington Minesh - and team etc those ridges were there during the Ice Age so let me show you just a quick glance at water coming down the Grand Coulee filling the Quincy bases but notice the water is being deflected by saddle mountains frenchmen hills etc so it's tough to put these things in perspective but the floods are a very recent just a few thousand years ago compared to the lava rock and the ridges yes there was ice we got it yes there was ice we've got it the ice sheet itself never got to i-90 in Washington didn't even get to us to the old sunset highway but almost north of us - we have beautiful glacial deposits not now just glacial deposits Lorraine's helping us figure out where the ice used to be and beautiful boulders like this this is uh partial and each of these is an erratic but it's a glacial erratic dropped by the itís not the floods quite yet anything was up here doing the surface exposure day they got these guys but just to get the position of the ice in particular time this is the most famous of the glacial erratics in Washington's called Jaeger rock up on Mansfield Plateau beautiful now the next concept is if you're next to a huge ice sheet you commonly have thick deposits of windblown silt called Bluffs this is a global pattern any time you have a huge ice sheet you have a bunch of wind blowing silk called loves and in places then Eastern Washington it's up to 200 feet thick if you go to wash cut down on 26 and you stop illegally and you're looking to be better if you look carefully and there are volcanic ash layers in the looks and you might go oh maybe that's our Mount st. Helens from 16,000 300 years ago turns out this one is 1.1 million years old from a volcanic eruption in northern Washington called the closed Shan caldera so the list goes back all the way to the beginning of the ice damage two and a half a million years the list is an old old story and the looks of course piles it to these beautiful rolling hills that we know as we head over towards Palmer list comprises that windblown still comprises everything there and if we didn't have the ice sheet in Washington we wouldn't have those Palouse hills now I've got a friend in town who lives in Spokane and he likes to fly his ultralight and here's time having some fun on an afternoon zooming over some of these hills made out of the kitchen flour made out of the loose and you can see it just stretch this as far as I can see it's a very unique landscape we don't have to tell most if you the country's like over there but it is really unique really really unique I can't think of other places in North America to have this kind of a set of rolling hills and Tom has fun with them so assault lava-rock 15,000,000 lust that's been deposited in the last 2.6 million years now let's get into the stuff we're talking about tonight which other Ice Age floods yes break through the Purcell no yeah get that water indistinct channels coming across future in Washington and that water is going to make it all the way to the mouth of the Columbia the water is also going to be slack as it goes down - Eugene Oregon it's truly a Pacific Northwest story for states are involved the water many times is coming from pleasure like Missoula we know exactly the high-water mark of that Lake and the valleys of western Montana behind the campus of University of Montana we can see these old beaches or these old strand lines the floors of many of these valleys of western Montana have Glacial make Missoula deposits within them if we drain the lake quickly we're in glacial lake Missoula now we're in Montana we can get these gravels that are forming into these beautiful giant pair of ripples as the water is leaving in a hurry the water leaves it goes across the panhandle of Idaho and already joined at when we look at that's our narrow bottleneck to get this water out of here and Lake Lewis is forming as a result the Purcell trench loke specifically looks like this you know standpoint that wasn't in the per so trench Moe if you know that condor ray that's ground zero for this place down failing and reforming failing and reforming and noticed that we changed the frigid blue water into chocolate milk because we start picking up the soil the sediment as we flow reached in Washington put into motion from Oregon Public Broadcasting a nice animation from quite a while ago showing the channel Scotland this is this is the fast loud one but here's our quiet water here's our quiet loner in the Yakima Valley here's some quiet water once it gets through a little cap it's the quiet spots that are gonna help us tonight get some ages but we're still just trying to wrap our minds around the drama of the release of the water another animation showing the Purcell Treach lope at Lake Pend Oreille let's bust it up let's release the water from glacial lake Missoula we don't know exactly look like this but this is a makes sense to me and we're stirring up the soil to make chocolate milk we're taking broken pieces of the ice damp and converting them into icebergs that are now going to float now this animator I don't know who he is went a little bit crazy we got all of Washington being swallowed up by a frog we need to scale that back room this is too much this is too much this is effective if we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and again this is this Jeff we don't want to change the channel here right so we're going to just have everybody gets small enough what did that experience feel like that was the ground shaking could you hear the audible or four minutes more difficult to know the yellow star is dry Falls the red star is Ellensburg we missed the whole show not one drop of Ice Age floodwater got into the Kittitas Valley but Vantage got hammered so then again there's no doubt of where the water's hit and where the waters messed and that's very clear to go out and take a look now let's leave i-90 to go up on 17 and visit Dry Falls I said we weren't going there tonight but I think I do want to go there just to capture the volume of the water and a source as much of the water that is going to fill our temporary bathtub call luis so you can raise your hand I'm sure almost everybody's been to drive Falls it's a very popular place on the way up to Grand Coulee Dam it's a place to stop there's a bathroom there's ice cream there's not everything that you never want write down a visitor center and this has got a place to stop for almost 100 years now dry falls state park Sun Lake State Park and so he back with Model T Fords and everything and family stop and contemplating the ice age floods that all fist the house not the distant house in the Columbia Gorge this is a different Vista Allison said China Falls has been there for almost 100 years and the experience is similar that has been for decades your stand in your little cage you look down we've got dry falls we contemplate the water the water that poured over that cliff oh this is America we don't even have to get on the car to contemplate because our buddy time again has been fly now overdrive Falls he's approaching the lip of drive Falls from the south so the visitor center is over here the parking lots over here and I want you to notice a couple things first of all look at all the rock that left the water took all this rock away but notice the size of these holes that have been drilled into the top of this bench above drum floss that's one that did that these are enormous pot holes drilled by Ice Age floodwater the itself the Grand Coulee is the hallmark feature of Ice Age flooding erosion and so remember we used to have a continuous blanket of Willis and all that basalt lava rock was there before the Ice Age now in places were missing whole chunks of it because the Ice Age floods came through and took everything away from localist teaching the field trip many of you have gone on many of our Sunday afternoon field trips at dry falls the story of drug halls is comforting to read that now here's my problem for almost a hundred years people have been in that parking lot Drive Falls and and visualizing Vince oh look honey kids gather around let's look at this this used to be a waterfall and everybody looking at that cliff pictures Niagara Falls and I understand why it's a very famous waterfall the Hecker Falls is our River a thin skip of water falling over a cliff making a horseshoe shape that's not what we want for the Ice Age floods this is not the best viewed visual for dry fall unless it's a very small flood of the one of the many floods coming down the Grand Coulee when the Okanagan lobe is in place so to remedy that we visited some animators in Portland this isn't a trendy Northwest neighbourhood of Portland everybody's like the rent closed and the right eye wear and they're very very nice folks and they're extremely skilled and I just grabbed my hat so I started snapping some photos and I'm sure I asked this young man if I could take his photo but they I don't know how they did it but they created what we were looking for for a little TV program that we're doing on dry falls so here are some of the rock clips that they were able to put together Chris smart from Central Washington University took a drum and lifted it so that's real photography but the guys down there at Portland put some water in it so we're lifting the drone over the parking lot what's that guy's name it's not Chris Christian was that guy's name Donald but his worker at the work station can't do it Donald's assistant was really the guy behind this MacDonald also Donald really put this together so let's do a couple more they did a beautiful job this is more for photography from Chris smart and then again don't ask me how they do this but they were proud of how about ramune used in the process I've heard from people that have seen this program and have emailed me and said I think you sensationalized here I think you won with the two of them this is this is too much I don't think I don't think you're right if anything we were concerned that if they feel that it says this is a 350 foot hop cliff and there was 350 feet of water coming over the cliff so if anything we chose a smaller flood if you want to think of it that way chocolate brown good reactions thank you here's a nice little touch Piper smart [Applause] there was more than 350 feet of water moving 65 miles an hour over this clip this is water from a bursting ice dam 170 miles away in Idaho that ripped through Central Washington a wall of water that dwarfed the local landscape with the energy of ten times the power of all the world's rivers combined an ice age flood with water rock soil and icebergs three and a half miles wide on a thundering journey to the Pacific Ocean [Music] you this work okay looking North Drive Falls is here the upper Grand Coulee is in the distance all the way up to Grand Coulee Dam look at how much dammit we're snow with the energetic water you haven't gotten in the quiet water yet but it's too fun to wrap our minds around how much energy took to rip up the dassault this way and to drill the potholes this is a truck these are 50 50 feet deep and quite a good size and diameter ancient Lakes otherwise known as potholes Coulee near Quincy Rena Coulee many of us know these are all places that are direct result of super energetic water coming into the bedroom the Palouse River Falls the police can with police falls over by Pullman they all reformed quickly by many of these Ice Age floods but you want to know exactly which flood did what and we're not there yet we maybe never will be there with the evidence that we've been able to put together let's go to where some of this water from Spokane hits down in the Palouse Falls and dumped into the Snake River this is the Snake River and on the inside of both of these curves giant flood bars are right in the edge of the river how do you pile gravel 200 feet above the river did the Snake River pile this gravel up that high or is something else going on here [Music] okay well let's think about this in river channels where is the slow water on the sides of a channel on the inside of curves and when rivers slow down as they enter a broad valley flood bars form in those quiet spots you've walked along a river you know what the rocks look like in flood bars the bigger the flood the bigger the rocks giant flood bars mean giant floods the Ice Age floods those giant flood bars next to the Snake River Snake River didn't make those the Ice Age floods created those the giant oh my god so the why is it actually going through a loop it's going through the Columbia River Gorge we did be roasted chasms carved by Ice Age floodwater in the Columbia River Gorge as well let me show you a couple photos of that here's the water shape you down to Eugene so when will falls a direct result that the energetic water coming down the Columbia River Gorge the next time you drive to Portland down the Columbia River Gorge notice that the bottom two thirds of those gorge walls are scoured exposed basalt bedrock by the Ice Age floods but the upper third of the walls of the Columbia River Gorge have their lives they have their self they're doing the farming up high and the ranch is down below the high-water mark if you know where to look this these evident pieces of evidence are everywhere the Vista house in the Columbia River Gorge some of the big floods got almost up to the parking lot here at the Vista house I thought of doing this this afternoon I looked at Google Maps look how long it take me to drive from the same point where the ice dam was for the Galatians floods and drive to a story work and according to Google Maps it took me about eight and a half hours without stopping I guess so who would win me on the flood if there's lot to give me a head start am I gonna make it to the ocean before then okay we are finally to select water seventh time don't give up on me now we got we got more but we're finally to what we want to set our eyes on it this is Burlingame ravine this is the place with the 40 slack water settings now that you know the significance of these bends but me remind you it's the soil upstream it's the soil that looks like this it's the soil that looks like this rolling wheat fields winter wheat and the hills are made out of loose silt kitchen flour windblown silt before the Ice Age this is what Eastern Washington looked like all right thank you so unless you saved right on top of the basalt by the way the chemistry of Ellis has nothing to do with the rock chemistry so usually soils are the result of broken down bedrock but in this case we blow this stuff in from the north from crushed granite and metamorphic rocks okay another quarry near by Ritz Ville light-coloured less sitting on top of this song I'm setting you up to remind you of this Blackwater sediments how look do you see something different here our rolling hill will suddenly stop why the floods came through and they took a bunch of the soil away here's Tom again it's lying to his right the Loess Hills are attacked the floods never hit that area but look at how obvious misty has left all the soil is gone and where did it go it got carried downstream until we get to Lake Louis and then we start dropping that soil remember so we're going to find the missing soil I don't know 50 70 miles down down the road in the form of a slack water so when you drive in Richville to Spokane you're either in the lush hills or you're not looks Hills or you're not looks Hills then you get carried away everything else yeah you're starting to see it now it's really beautiful and very simple very elegant there's these islands of looks that were untouched but everything surrounding those islands these soil got swept away by the flood how about that at least a National Geographic article up high looking down on one of the remaining Islands of loose in the Cheney Palouse scapula finally we're going to get that stuff is sediment that was taken away by you ready slack water sediment so let's go to a little bit first 40 layers 40 separate lakes 40 separate floods you're maybe the chalkboard especially now 11 from the top well on st. Helens ash can't see it in this photo so I over the weekend I kind of put this together foam a little Sharpie marking pens and tried to correlate them by time 13,000 down to 19,000 years ago and we're at Burlingame ravine right now here's some wonderful video on loan to us from the Washington wine commission this is private land and they got permission to fly their drone in Burlingame ravine and that's no longer possible and so we're lucky to have this footage from the wine people thank you for that they put a little promo video together for their industry but for our purposes they're dropping us right down to these black water sediment layers you might be interested that this canal was not here this ditch was not here before 1926 there was a an accident with an irrigation ditch and the water left the canal started digging aggressively into this soft material so a week worth of accidental water in the 20s carved this Canyon not the Ice Age floods but remember there's a person for spanner flying the drone the bigger the thicker layers are at the bottom of the thinner are up high that was the signature that we had on the chalkboard and all three of our locations where are we bottom of Lake Lewis near Walla Walla Burlingame ravine 40 layers let's leave Burlingame do we have other beds you drive a high 82 you go by Silla every time Silla the tunnels else gives me the town of cell is on top of some of these beds the Mount st. Helens ash is not 11 from the top I think it's four from the time we go to the outcome of Valley we can get a good look this is near Benton City and we can see that the Mount st. Helens in ash 16300 years ago actually it's found in a couple a couplet there's two distinct eruptions of that st. Helens ash separated by maybe a few years I'm not quite sure I don't know if anybody knows so that's the same house - close up a good time marker for us in this Blackwater sentiment let's go to the Pascal base this is the white blocks along the free-flowing stretch of the Columbia known as the Hanford Reach more slack water sediments a person up there for stable each of these is a flood separated by some other deposit you see how beautiful this is and how plentiful these Blackwater sediments are there's a person for scale welcome you can see separate Blackwater sentiments at the white plunge no ashes in this location at all we don't know where we are have no idea about the ages one more with Lake Lewis let's go of all places from Lewiston item what the hell's canyon for goodness sake so the water waiting to go through a little again with a big flood there was so much water that the lake crept its way up the snake all the way into the partial portion of Hells Canyon that quiet chocolate-milk quiet water got all the way to Lewiston so this is a key spot these are slack water sediments from the Missoula floods were in Tammany barges south of Lewiston Idaho each of these is a separate Missoula flood for 150 miles upstream from lilulu gap that means water from Montana made it to WA Lula gap and had to back up this far up the Snake River drainage this is one event silt falling from the bottom of Lake Lewis and another flood and another flood now that's amazing 20 floodwater sediments Missoula floods on top of this remember that's one flood in Utah it came through southern Idaho called the Bonneville flood we know the age of the Bonneville flood so this is another way to keep track of time the date when we made this video program for the Bonneville was seventeen thousand four hundred there's a new paper out that says we're closer to eighteen thousand years ago for the Bonneville not sure we're getting that number but regardless it's an old event and it's water really at least releasing out of Lake Bonneville through the Snake River through Hells Canyon one flood let's go ahead with that one day seventeen thousand four hundred years ago and it helps us keep track of time so this isn't a Snake River in southern Idaho or floods one fluffs are in one flood the look at all these grounds both published by water what's one how can you walk through that field and I think something unusual didn't happen right [Laughter] gorgeous deposit all these rocks were deposited by the Bonneville flood just one flood right just a few weeks all these rocks were dropped seventeen thousand four hundred years ago sitting on top our Missoula flood sediments there are 20 different Missoula flood layers here so at this spot we had 20 Missoula floods after the Bonneville flood south of Lewiston Idaho great location but sleeve Lake Lewis finally ran the rat waiting stages of this talk let's go up to glacial lake Columbia briefly and those are the 89 beds this is behind Okanagan low Bryan Atwater doing the work back in the 1980s we're here in the sand pile arm of Lake Roosevelt black-and-white photos but hopefully we'll still get the impression that we've got this repetitive I think failed to mention it's like water sediments are also sometimes called rhythm ice and there's something else called a var so these should look different to you this is one slack water static layer that's what slack water set up at the time but these dark white dark white bands are annual deposits called bars we've got a clip to help explain that in just a second Michelle Hanson also in glacial Lake Columbia finds that carbon dated 13400 here's your paper in 2016 from glacier lake columbia more familiar these all look familiar to us no and that's the point these familiar beds you can find where the water was quiet glacial lake columbia stretches all the way to downtown spokane right outside of Spokane there are some beds in late on creeks also a place to worth it slack water sediment these are my Spokane Airport are mysterious I don't know to do with you this is a coarse sand and some whipped up blocks that are clearly from the Ice Age floods but there's ongoing discussions about what that thick set of coarse sand is telling us it's quite a spot it's at a quarry near the Spokane Airport but I don't know what to do with this quite yet finally we go up to Montana to the source of many of the floods the place right along i-90 the late was known first by Joseph Pardee back in 1910 even before brett's was starting to work on its problem and this is the famous nine miles exposure right along the freeway maybe I'll show you a little video clip and see if you remember remember this is the one that has the Glacier Peak ash and tub and all these rock water sediments are down below these are famous silty beds west of Missoula partly because we're still debating the significance of them these are rhythmites there's 40 of them here with that zebra striping what's the story why are these delicate silks still here if this is a place where high-energy floodwater was cruising through these repetitive layers of silt and mud contained details with important clues but debate continues and what these layers are telling us about glacial lake Missoula is history even the terms are confusing rhythmites varves are they the same thing not here at 9 mile interstate 90 from the freeway you can see the rhythmites dark light dark light from the freeway those are the zebra stripes but within one dark zebra stripe varves at a tinier scale dark light dark light those are annual patterns dark light couplet that's one winter summer pattern varves rhythmites many geologists see the more than 500 var of couplets here as annual layers like counting tree rings in the mud but not everybody agrees that these tiny layers are annual so there is a condition then debating those to close bathtubs and counting the bars to keep track of time if you have 50 bar couplets you've got 50 years of refill and glacial of Missoula before it must armenia.if you've been a hundred marks between to slack water sentiments you've got a house full century between the flames but even that kind of content has its opponents and so it's not conventional knowledge Pearson OSL dates from Larry Smith has been working in glacial lake Missoula also don't quite to do yet with those days they're promising but they don't fit into the next narrative that I gave you on the chalkboard finding your attics theoretics the blocks of rock that clearly removed tens of miles by the floodwaters themselves they don't match everything is basically basalt lava rock and so if you see any big boulder that's not resolved you know that it came in by the Ice Age floods if your shelf of the ice sheet itself they stand out like a sore thumb or that's not that's a negative term they're beautiful and there are hundreds and hundreds of these and I'm sure that you know where some of them okay you can look at the granite and find bedrock matches who's granted at the surface in the bedrock right at Grand Coulee Dam so that's a possible place for some of the granite direct and the locomotion for many of those boulders is to RAF none of these blocks of ice remember the icebergs are the broken up pieces of the ice dam up in northern Idaho this is a really beautiful erratic south of Sentinel gap so we're near the town of the Manimal and John Stone from University of Washington using the surface exposure thing I was talking about with the radioactive ice oops his date for how long that boulders been sitting there is fourteen thousand fifty years ice wrap that arrives their batter will Washington hello I don't think that all right so got students coming out there checking out they love that a bouldering you can hike out to it pretty easy it's about a 20-minute walk from the car Blake Lewis we used the map locations of those erratic s-- and the rhythmites to put this together and we can visualize these icebergs floating in on top of tri-cities as late Lewis and smart leads to play the same game up in Wenatchee and up the 1x you remember every gold star here is an ice raft at erratic that came in the fast-moving water was coming down to Columbia and the quiet water was creeping up this is the eighteen thousand year old slacks when the Okanagan lobe was not in place yet flood water lapping up against that glacier that's quite a story what evidence do we have for that we've used Ice Age flooding excites to reconstruct this part of the story erratic s-- light-colored boulders scattered on the hillsides here in the Wenatchee River Valley up to 300 feet above the river are those boulders up to 600 feet above the river here at Wenatchee we've got these ice raft adir attics telling us where the high-water mark was of this quiet bathtub water working its way up the Wenatchee River in fact all the beautiful orchards that are in the floor of the Wenatchee Valley are on slack water sediment to be precise so here's a boulder that every about this dated using the surface exposure eighteen thousand two hundred years ago that boulders been sitting there on sunny slope just to the north side of Wenatchee and really let's meet her she's at dry fall talking to some folks there's a new technique to work with the surfaces of these boulders to figure out exactly how many years they've been sitting here in other words there's a new way to determine the age of the Ice Age floods so the cosmogenic nuclides technique is very valuable because it brings something new to this story it lets us date the landforms specifically so we can go to the wool ulla gap and we can date a giant boulder there and tell you when it was put down and massive water was coming through and backed up behind the wall ulla gap we can date giant rafted boulders in western Wenatchee and tell you when a massive flood came through that area we can talk about the afraid of fan and talk about when the debris dam failed we can talk about these events that crafted these geomorphic features through time very specifically for the first time in the study of the Pleistocene megaphones Thank You Andrea she's a promising newcomer on the store and here's some images from her paper that came out a couple years ago every red paper there is a separate place we have to go attic this is an important plot 10,000 to 20,000 years ago she's got a bunch of ice wrap the neurotics that were sitting there for about 14,000 years another collection fifteen thousand five hundred and here the Wenatchee erratics at 18,000 plus the Green Line is what I'd like to mention briefly there's a spike in the Green Line at about 18,000 years ago there's new work that's been done the floor of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington and the work has been done looking at diatoms in the seven on the ocean floor freshwater diatoms so this spike is telling the researchers are working with the Pacific ocean sediments that a huge freshwater dump went into the Pacific at about 18,000 years ago why and ice age flood or to the Bonneville float about that time and some of our moms get floods coming over one attribute and one action was wet is also about that time so that's a new frontier working with sediments in the Pacific to help understand the timing of these Ice Age floods so busy maps like this are from Andrea and Richard Waits talks I gave you the chalkboard version that's down and dirty I'm happy to share this paper by Richard Wright with you to put through these time and panels there's other things going on of course so don't expect us to really absorb much of this except to see that that basic story that's emerging from both an tree and Richards work is coming down here's a quick list and listen to Richard way the other the other big thing in that area was the mouth of Moses Cooley there was a big bar there is a big bar and it has quite a few beds in it they had come out of Moses Coulee because they're basaltic the Columbia Valley from the north has got all of these crystalline rocks and sedimentary rocks so bright colored gravel anything coming from the east across the Columbia plane cumbia plateau is basaltic yeah and certain stuff coming out of the gravel coming out of Moses Cooley was basaltic so you could easily recognize where it came from it had it had come into the Columbia from Moses Coulee and not down the Columbia past Wenatchee Moses Cooley was dammed off during most of the flood history because of the Okanagan loped had covered the upper end of the Cooley so water couldn't get into it and yet there obviously is a flood cut huge co-leader its second in grandeur only two grand Grand Coulee it really is at the mouth of Moses Cooley I could find five gravel beds separated by finer finer sediments and some of them are so fine is clear that the water to actually stopped in between so here is evidence that the mouth of Moses Cooley that had been not just one flood but two or even five down a Coulee that had been blocked off during most of the history of the floods so this was another eye-opener and previous to working with those deposits you were a one flood person well yes you you you as a principle called Occam's razor where you shave your interpretation down so there's no more elaborate than the evidence of the house so yes I didn't have any evidence for more than one Bigfoot and that big that huge bar and Wenatchee that I'd recognize and some of a few other features I knew those Cooley is a problem it's still difficult to explain we had a visitor from Canada who rival University promised my argument is that what we're looking at from home a plateau crossing the Columbia to whatever plateau to foster Creek the Mansfield channels the Moses Cooley is one single integrated training system it's a single integrated drainage system it may operate in segments it may operate at different times or maybe utilize at different times we're getting because when you talk about a bit later so k1 is making the case that there's some sublation flow that you can have major Ice Age floods come up underneath that will be knocking over and pour right down the noses of cool so to be continued with that as well the panel's the panels the story in my simple terms of both Richards and Andrea's dates are in the upper left and there's a disagreement on some of the specifics but the business of bringing the Purcell boat down that bringing the Okanagan will then give another solo then finally giving the Okanagan boat is what we want as the general ecology that may be new information for many of you there's loads and loads of evidence to back up that basic chronology we're going to finish by going to a famous place called West bar the enormous giant carp ripples and a small boat probably big boat and the Columbia member and we now what this dating business and Richard work have been able to realize that the last major slide down the Columbia after we bust up the Okanagan lobe is responsible for the giant particles across the river from Trinidad and Crescent Marcus aggressive born here and this patch of real estate is that last gas that coated that small saline coming directly from Canada I hate to bring this up but I'm going to there are places out in eastern Washington that are what rebels that are severely whether they look really old and there are huge products here our ribs bill here by the Gorge Amphitheatre they both lie beneath the sediment horizon that clearly is older than seven hundred eighty thousand years ago there are some flood graduates in just a few spots of Eastern Washington that are for sure brought yeah and deposited by flood line over the seven hundred eighty thousand years ago so I know this is a departure for we're just talking about but it's worth mentioning that we have many many very very old Ice Age floods with very scant evidence for but there's a few places that tell us the chronology and chatting with you tonight is just the last ones of a two and a half million years format I promised I'd finish with some archaeology slides we've got dates from Paisley caves in Oregon that go back to fourteen thousand six hundred years ago now we had data Jenkins from the others before visiting our campus a couple months ago he's got human hair there's twelve thousand five hundred years ago in his work in cave he's got artifacts and complex pathways for those going back 13,000 14,000 what's the latest date of our Ice Age in the Pacific Northwest fourteen thousand the last flood the smaller 13,300 were already overlap now we're Oregon with the pace of the case there are some tools below Glacier Peak ash your pocket was fully and the pain borne our location which is East Wenatchee has artifacts 13,000 close so again this is not my specialty but let's use this book that I found to visit a couple of quick places visually it was an archaeological dig way by date one Airport East Wenatchee 1987 and they were finding these tools in use of an action on top of a giant foot bar that would you way was talking about archaeologically these tools 8 to 13 thousand so 13,000 that's too young for our Ice Age floods right five two centuries of the Mars rock shelter Palouse River Resnick is into the snake major archaeological digs there especially as they're putting the dams in and flooding those valleys and back in the nineteen sixties this is a basalt spear point on length and Jim Chavis was in there in the 1960s early in his career that they were finding human remains on the floodplain below the Mars rock shelter dating to 11,000 Keeler years ago these are calendar here is now an unready apartment and parts of humans also the rock shelter itself remains going back more than 10,000 years these remember now these are too young to be tied to the Ice Age floods but I'm just giving you a little quick survey of all the known archaeological sites that have yielded some days just on the Vantage Sentinel gap back in 1997 they were finding hundreds and thousands of stone tools full of artifacts all dating to about 12,000 calendar years ago over by Linda cooling on the way to RIT's build a century a big set of archaeological digs in the 1970s and she butchered bison moments from 12,500 calendar years ago showing these dates and remaining on yeah we're a little too young for the ice age votes directly but people especially to pay for the caves are definitely the Pacific Northwest for the last couple major plus and minus some recommendations that we're done this book is upstanding my introduction archaeological in Washington by Kirk and Richard owners or not a lot so a couple days later beautifully done books on the Ice Age floods for general readers thumps you can't get better than this on the trail of a message from by Bruce you want instead books one two and four free right now on your way home tonight huge splits dot-com a beautiful collection of photographs and videos by far by the name of Tom Foster Winston Pascoe and he has done an amazing job with his website spreading the gospel of the NSA to us with Florida grass like this many of the mood for was in this presentation were directly from California thanks to you everybody for coming and contemplating the ages of these wonderful I see [Applause]
Professor Zentner gives a public lecture about the repeating ice age floods that occurred when ice dams gave way producing massive floods responsible for much of modern topography in that part of the country.
Absolutely brilliant. Well done in the illustrations. They are very difficult to fathom. I especially enjoy the updated information. True scientific method presentations!
Great! I’ve been looking for something like this. Thank you, OP!