Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest

[Music] great lavas of the pacific northwest that's the topic tonight we've got both a map and a cross-section of these great lavas these flood basalts so let's say you don't know anything about these you probably do but let's just say you don't is it true that these bedrock layers in eastern washington are lava rock they are is it true that those lava rocks these flood basalts came from mount rainier they did not when mount rainier or any cone-shaped volcano in the cascade erupts they make andesite lavas or rhiolite lavas or daysite lavas these are different kinds of chemistries and these are basalts look at this map look at how much of the pacific northwest has this thick pile of basalt lava nothing to do with the cascades let's get that out of our minds right now mount rainier mount hood i don't care nothing to do with tonight's talk is it true that these giant lava flows and they are giant some of them traveled 300 miles some of them are more than a hundred feet thick is it true that those lava flows are unusual sure i mean they're bigger than the lava flows you see in hawaii or iceland where we're going to go tonight by the way but is this the only place in the world that we have these kinds of lavas no no there are flood lavas like these in siberia there are flood lavas like these in india well okay fine but ours must be the biggest and the best right i mean you know no we are small potatoes compared to these other flood basalt areas and we will look at the volumes tonight as well have you heard this one there's mass extinctions in our planet's history where large percentages of all living things disappear from the fossil record mass extinctions you've heard of those maybe have you ever heard that there's a connection between these flood lavas the age of these flood lavas and these mass extinctions oh some of you have well good well i'll expand on that as well so we got a lot to talk about in addition to the basic stuff i've always done one more introductory comment this is just a big pile of lava surrounded by stuff that's not lava essentially and in this cross section we can see this stuff here that's just buried beneath all this lava so if you are a geologist who loves all this old rock all these metamorphic and granite rocks and they tell all these old stories of washington you hate the columbia river basalt lavas if you are a person who loves all these rocks or loves all these rocks you're not a fan of these flood basalts because the flood basalts have buried almost everything here's one place that the lavas have not buried everything that's called steptoe butte over by pullman that's a mountain peak that kept its chin up above all of these lavas but most of those mountains are still down there they're just under and i'm not making this up now two miles of love in some places more than three miles of love so i've heard on field trips geologists who love these other rocks talk to this as a big giant cow pie they're not a fan of our flood lavas our great lavas of tonight but some of you came into town you had a beautiful meal downtown so you don't want to talk about cow pies and i understand so let's not call it a cow pie let's call it a german chocolate cake how about that okay brown brown rock brown so this is the cake these are the lavas somebody get that and the age of these eruptions is very specific 17 million years ago is when these lavas began erupting 6 million years ago is when these lavas ended 17 to 6. we got a pretty good answer about what happened 17 million years ago to start this eruption story we have less of a satisfying answer to explain why the system stopped but at least these eruptions are something you don't have to worry about you know most of these geology lectures are some sort of terror thing you know it's an earthquake and the thing is going to come the landslide so this is all stuff tonight just safely tucked in the past and there's no chance in the foreseeable future we'll have any of these eruptions a couple final comments from these images before we erase them and move on to something else as i mentioned these are mostly metamorphic and granite rocks however there's also at the upper part of these old rocks thick sections of sedimentary rock the swap formation some of you know about this walk formation we've talked about that in association with the liberty gold fields so there are thick sections thousands of vertical feet of sedimentary rock beneath many of these places where our german chocolate cake is and the oil people been here they've been drilling they've been looking for oil and natural gas they were here in the 2000s they were here back in the 1980s shell folks from canada and they're probably coming back because there's enough indications that beneath this german chocolate cake there are large pools large reservoirs of oil and natural gas depends on who you talk to but that drilling has helped us understand exactly how thick these lavas are the top of the german chocolate cake in places there's a bunch of dots here this is loose this is wind blown silt it's kind of right here on this map loose is wind-blown silt it's silt that blew in off the winds and got deposited this is still a bit of a question mark even today where ultimately is the origin of the palouse hills so that's what i'm talking about so if you get towards pullman you know those rolling wheat fields and all that that's a unique landscape those hills are made out of this this kitchen flower ultimately it's still difficult to prove where that stuff came from yes the ice age floods came and eroded some and redeposited but i'm talking about ultimately where did that list come from to begin with it's been called the palouse problem for more than a century in geology circles i don't know if you can read this from the back but this says land sinks how much weight are we talking about if we're going to erupt two miles worth of german chocolate cake and plop it on to this landscape before 17 million years ago the answer is a lot it's going to weigh a lot and we are sure that this portion of the northwest has been physically depressed we have crustally loaded this section of north america excuse me pacific northwest with these thick lavas you know we do this with ice sheets but the ice eventually melts away and the crust rebounds this is permanently displaced permanently depressed down warped and elevation of what the tri-cities is 500 feet above sea level or sea level or something like that this is a landscape that was at sea level or higher these are mountains that are now more than ten thousand feet below sea level that's how much crustal loading or sinking we're talking about so the mantle which is below the earth crust must have been displaced or flowed away from this subsided region okay onward oh you'd like well can't we do a little question and answer here no there's 250 people here we can't do that okay so we're moving on we're keeping it going so let's take that german chocolate cake which again is our stack of lavas by the way there are 300 separate lavas did i say that already maybe maybe not let's do a little stratigraphic column let's basically go through our cake from bottom to top we're drilling down into these lavas now and i'm not going to go through all the literature and all the names and all that sort of stuff i've done that work for you but down here at the bottom here's 16 excuse me 17 million years ago here's 6 million years up here now that's a misleading way to say this technically that's true these lavas came out 17 to 6 million years ago but as we'll see here it's not the best way to portray what we're talking about 16 15.6 we can really subdivide these eruptions of these basaltic lavas into sub events we have kind of an initial phase an initial phase of the eruption the first one million years our relatively minor lavas coming to the surface there's a payoff for this discussion by the way coming in just a second and then we have a a main phase where the system is really working full throttle and notice that's just 400 000 years just but that's you know it's it's it's a relatively tight window where we're really pumping out these lavas and these lavas are literally coming out of the ground in idaho and flowing to the oregon coast it's just during that main phase time and then this waning phase these are not my words these are from some of the geology that's been working on this the waning phase is more than 10 million years there's minor little drips and drabs and little little worms of little orange things coming out just on occasion but this is a this thing has finished with a whimper it has not finished with a bang we'll talk about some of these waning phase lavas because they are most prominent in washington the ginkgo lava flow the rosa lava flow maybe some of you know some of those names but this point of this stratigraphic column is to show that we've got a main phase right here okay with this map hey you want to see a magic trick i got an eraser i only got one eraser up here you ready turns out sharpie markers also have sharpie markers with paint it's like a paint can so okay why 17 million and where are these lavas coming from precisely there's a relationship with these lavas to the yellowstone hot spot with the yellowstone hotspot so let's fill you in and there are some problems with this connection not every geologist loves this idea but i'm a fan and many people see at least a timing connection and that's what we want to try to do so where are these lavas the lavas are here they came out of cracks sure where are the cracks well the wane let's do it let's go backwards the waning phase cracks as we'll see with these beautiful maps i have for you are generally up here in southeastern washington the ones that are young let's go back in time during the main phase the cracks are here during the initial phase in other words when this system got started the cracks were down here in southeast oregon so we're not making a cake and we're not having the lavas come up each and fill the same cake every time there's portions of the cake we're building geographically at different times here's the point this whole volcanism story to make this german chocolate cake is starting down here and these cracks are getting younger as we go north something is happening initially here and by the time we're done the cracks are opening up here in washington that's the convincing evidence all these cracks are not the same age that's the convincing evidence that it's related to the yellowstone hot spot you're like what yellowstone is that like wyoming yes yellowstone is right here it's a big circular crater that went kaboom 640 thousand years ago and then if you go further back in time there was another crater here and another crater here and here and here and here and here there's a whole beautiful string of pearls that stretches across much of this map each of these is a circular caldera each is from an explosive volcanic activity related to the yellowstone hot spot the concept is today there's a yellowstone hot spot beneath northeastern northwestern wyoming but in the past the yellowstone hot spot was at different locations five million years ago the hot spot was at pocatello idaho 10 million years it was at twin falls idaho 17 million years ago where was the yellowstone hot spot right here in northern nevada where we have our earliest cracks forming at the same time is that a coincidence you can't tell me it's a coincidence you can't tell me the cracks that are making our lavas and this yellowstone hot spot story happens to be at the same place at the same time without any connection whatsoever by the way last winter we had a lecture talking about evidence for the yellowstone hotspot being 55 million years old at least 55 and you go well the hot spot then is moving 55 40 30 20 10 here some of you know this the hot spot is not moving the north american plate is moving over the stationary hot spot we can still get the same pattern right instead of moving the heat source we're holding the hot the heat source steady and we're moving the north american plate over the top regardless all i'm trying to say is that there are uh temporal and spatial connections between the yellowstone hotspot story and these cracks i'll give you one example of what's the problem with this why would the main phase be up here when we initiate the story down here wouldn't you expect the biggest and most voluminous love is to come out where we have the heat you get it so there's a lot of back and forth but yellowstone hot spot is a story that i like we're keeping it moving we're keeping it moving where's my little sketch here hang on just a sec right right right ah one more thing so the whole cake was not built steadily as i've already implied 90 percent of the volume 90 percent of the magma that came to the surface came out during that 400 000 year old time only seven percent of the columbia river basalt flood province came out early and only three percent of the total volume came out in the last 10 and 10 million years and change if you're a numbers person and love the number of flows we're talking roughly 180 separate basalt flows during the main time uh a hundred flows roughly in this waning time and 20 flows initially hopefully my math adds up to 300. okay good i want to do a couple more things with these chalkboards and then we've got to go to these places i've got specific directions for you that's maybe the thing i'm most excited about tonight specific driving directions on how to get to some of these cracks how to know you're at ground zero for some of these eruptions that's what we're going to do right now oh there's murmuring in the crowd you like that all right uh so here are the cracks we know they're not all the same age right now i've been here 25 years been teaching about these lavas for 25 years so i have a standard approach that i'm that needs updating that's why we're doing this lecture you know i'm kind of kind of bored with it it's kind of stale so here's one thing that i had no idea about until two years ago and i got so excited that i spent much of a summer out there playing around with this discovery i didn't make the discovery i have people who help me find new scientific papers john lash or other folks send me good information and i just follow those sorts of things so for 25 years i would say hey students at central you want to go find these cracks these are called fissures that's where the lava came up if you want to go find a fissure you've got to go find what we call a feeder dike in geology as a dike is typically a vertical wall of rock that cuts across grand canyon like rocks all right so we've got just horizontal layers we don't care what kind of rock it is and then cutting up through those horizontal layers is this vertical feeder dyke and this is basalt right that's the kind of rock we're talking about if you don't have a visual basalt you'll be sick of basalt by the time we're done with all the photos etc so again up until recently i would say well there's a dike here there's a feeder dike here there's a feeder dike here there's a feeder dike here in other words there's these places where you have deep river canyons you've cut into the earth naturally and you look at the walls of the river canyons you can find some of the plumbing system basically of these fissures that erupted material and that is true i'll show you some of those and i'll show you how to find some of those specifically here's the part that i got excited about are you aware this is my attempt to draw in three dimensions by the way are you aware that even though some of these eruptions were 15 million years ago there are still places on the surface where you can see the lava after it came out of the sky and fell on the ground in other words when this lava is liquid and orange and hawaiian like we have a fire fountain we have gases coming up with the lava it's throwing these globs of basaltic magma just you know um globs of butter just falling out of the sky and landing right next to the vent i didn't know that i thought it was all just these old feeder dikes down below but what i want to show you tonight especially with a little video clip is spatter finding places where there's actually honest-to-god spatter that's 15 million years old that's right next to the road that you've driven you drove by you didn't know you're driving to spokane on the freeway and you're driving right over a big place where there was a curtain of fire and there's spatter falling out of the sky i didn't know it either so it's not only this plumbing system of these vents it's this material coming out of these curtains of fire so we want to picture this like a like a fountain in a shopping mall but it's not water it's orange hawaiian lava that's propelled hundreds of feet up in the sky and then having this stuff fall and come to rest it's a nice visual i got one so each of these are not the same in other words we get old to young and the young ones especially have some of their spatters still preserved while the older ones can only be found with deep dissection okay got one more thing with the chalkboard perfect what else did i have in the introduction that we haven't expanded on yeah comparing our german chocolate cake with siberia and india and ultimately linking them somehow to mass extinctions in our fossil record let me do this quickly see if this works for you so let's pretend this is geology 101 now and it's the first day and you're learning the geologic time scale this is of our planet now and uh we've got this and we've got the earth forming 4 600 million years ago 4.6 billion according to science that's the age of the earth zero million years is right now this evening at the hell home center in ellensburg washington 66 million years ago 251 million years ago million years ago those are benchmark dates in our past why because each of these major benchmark dates talks about a significant change in the fossil record and i'm not a biologist i know very little about paleontology but i do know that the precambrian and the paleozoic and the mesozoic and the cenozoic eras are subdivided by those major time markers those major benchmark dates for instance i don't care where you find a dinosaur bone i don't know i care what continent you are on if you find that dinosaur bone i know you are pulling that bone out of a rock that's between 251 and 66 million years ago that's that's the way this works dinosaurs are only found in this particular thing in other words 66 million years ago as many of you know dinosaurs remove themselves from the fossil record there's not one dinosaur bone that's younger than 66 million years ago any place on earth so that's what the mass extinction it wasn't just the dinosaurs it was large groups of plants and animals that disappeared suddenly this has been a mystery for a long time this is not a lecture on mass extinctions i'm just going to make this connection to these flood basalts by doing what by doing this uh let's pick 16 million years ago those are us that's the columbia river basalts tonight we know it's 17 to six but let's just pick one number okay for maine phase start 16 million years ago those are the columbia river basalt lavas 66 million years ago we happen to have an incredible pile of flood basalts in india is it a coincidence they're at exactly the same time that all these dinosaurs and 75 percent of all uh genus disappear from the planet 251 million years ago another major change in our fossil record happens to be exactly the age of the flood basalts in russia in siberia there's another one of these at uh 201 million years ago which happens to be the boundary between the triassic and the jurassic you've heard of jurassic park so there's another tremendous mass extinction 201 million years ago so let's do that mass extinction mass extinction there's another mass extinction there's only five major ones in our history and three of them happen to be associated with these flood basalts the flood basalts that are 201 million years ago flooded onto something called pangaea where all the continents of the world were together in one big hunk and it just so happens that as pangaea just started to break apart these flood basalts were coming up is there a connection between the breakup of a supercontinent and flood basalts and a mass extinction at the same time apparently there's something going on that we still have not totally figured out so i'll put pangaea here just to kind of remind you last thing i want to do with this is to compare our our cake with the other cakes uh we're a cupcake compared to the other german chocolate cakes i promise i just i just thought of that okay great uh so this is difficult to do but i found some numbers uh from a different a number of different sources and the numbers change a little bit from source to source so this is the best i can do for you i tried to look up the number of acres buried by this lava of course these are going to be big numbers right and in fact we need to do millions of acres buried that's how much we're talking about so all of our pacific northwest flood basalts buried 45 million 45 million acres that first map i had over there with all the area that was buried that's 45 million acres washington oregon idaho et cetera india 370 million acres siberia 1.7 billion acres the pangaea flood basalts 2.7 billion are we on par with the other flood basalt regions of the world according to acres no oh but maybe volume maybe we still have a chance maybe it's volume maybe if we just talk about the volume the material the amount of material that came out of the cracks in total volume in miles cubed 50 000 cubic miles for our columbia river basalt lavas i don't have room to write all these numbers but you're starting to get the idea india has 2.5 times our volume of material coming out uh pangaea 12 times our volume siberia 20 times the volume of the columbia river basalt lavas so i went to a national geology meeting a couple of years ago in baltimore and i went south through talk after talk on mass extinctions and the connection to these lips these large igneous provinces they're called so this is a real thing and if you're waiting for some sort of scenario now with here's exactly what happened i don't have it and science doesn't have it all i want i'm comfortable saying tonight is that timing wise we are linking these mass extinctions with major flood basalt activity around the world and you'll see on the couple of diagrams i have for you there's more than just these four great so it's important now to add the visuals ideally we'd all jump in vans right now and we'd go out and find all these places right that's the real way to do geology but the best we can do well it's either hit or miss here i think i think we're good thank you oh yeah will that work okay great thank you so we want to do as much as we can with these visuals here tonight doing the best we can to kind of visualize this through maps and photographs and video clips so of course we are here centrally located in the state it's a great place to study geology but we are not centrally located in these columbia river basalt lavas we're at the margin and that's also convenient for us so we can study the lavas but we can also go not very far north and get out of these lavas pretty easily so uniformitarianism in geology tells us if you want to understand the past you need to study the present very carefully so there are active basaltic eruptions on the island of hawaii of course miniature versions even of us right miniature versions of the cupcake but we still have that material so if we go to the big island of hawaii we've had an ongoing eruption the summit of kilauea for more than 30 years now and this is how fluid this basaltic lava is this is a lake at the summit of kilauea and here's another place that we have beautiful visc not viscous the opposite of viscous very runny very low viscous that's almost water isn't it but it's lava and when this stuff finally runs out of heat it turns black it turns brown and it becomes basalt this is the stuff we're talking about tonight and this was ellensburg this was walla walla this was lewiston idaho back during this time that we were talking about this is maybe more accurate this is this fire fountaining i was talking about this is what we want to visualize when the magma comes to that vent and actually gets to the surface these are gases that are sending this magma up into the sky this is not slow motion by the way this is in iceland we're in a helicopter the camera is kind of shaky but this is more along the lines of what we want to try to visualize for some of the individual vents for these individual eruptions okay well let's take a little tour just to impress upon you how vast this region is moses cooley two flows there two two lava flows of the three hundred right three lava flows here where us-2 crosses moses cooley vantage washington six or seven of these lava flows you get it you only see a few of the layers at a time you never see the whole cake you never see the whole cake look at the scale here we're looking north advantage here's the i-90 bridge here's a huge semi and here's one lava flow and another one we just have two flows in that picture uh up on saddle mountains looking west the gorge amphitheater everybody's enjoying the music looking at the stage there's always a couple geologists in the crowd not looking at the stage here's a friend named tom tabard who likes to fly and record his flights he's over banks lake and we're getting a sense of kind of the horizontal nature these are just two or three of the main phase eruptions up in the upper grand coulee yakima river canyon south of ellensburg think of how varied these locations are except for geology wallula gap and the columbia river each of these layers has been carefully identified carefully studied we know exactly how each of those flows traveled this is swallows nest rock at lewiston idaho the grand ronde river canyon one of the place i'm going to introduce you to tonight wonderful part of southeast washington great and when we get to the edge of these lavas it's an abrupt change here's north of ellensburg get to the edge of table mountain and lions rock you're out of our lavas you're out of the cow pie and you're into this rugged much older stuart range go west of yakima get up onto those flanks you leave the columbia river basalt and you get up into the cascades which again we know has nothing to do with tonight's lavas and even out here at the oregon coast even all the way out here we have our lavas that came out of the ground in eastern oregon eastern washington and in some cases even western idaho these are chemically matched these are not guesses we can follow these flows from place to place and put the story together there's a beautiful brand new book called geology roadside geology of oregon by marley miller i know you know the roadside series but those are the yellow covered ones that are 30 years old she's redoing some of these and she had an interesting morsel i didn't know number one seal rock if you know the oregon coast is the southernmost place on the oregon coast where you have our lavas but this blew my mind according to her digging in scientific papers the lavas once they got to the ocean didn't stop they didn't just kiss the shore and stop they picked up speed dug into the sediment beneath the ocean made another pool of underground magma had new feeder dikes and new eruptions on the floor of the pacific ocean well this is quite a story this is quite a story so i want to make sure it's clear that i'm a teacher i don't do any of this research my thing is taking all this science and packaging in a way that it works for a large audience so the guy that did most of this work is named steve rydell and he came out with a beautiful volume of technical scientific papers in the 1980s 1989 and again he came up with an improved kind of updated version of those science papers in 2014 this volume is kind of the inspiration for putting this talk together there's a lot of great detail in there and it's not just steve even though i'm going to mention his name a few more times it's colleagues of his that have spent their whole careers 40 plus years on foot hiking around and putting this science together they did a beautiful job steve also lives in the tri-cities and for a while he was writing a newspaper columns in the tri-city heralds and he compiled those in a little book called big black boring rock and uh so if you're into kind of casual science reading kind of newspaper column type stuff you can find that on amazon pretty easily big black boring rock by steve rydell so hopefully you're now looking at this map of the northwest with a new set of eyes look at how flat it is out here we know why it's flat the crust got loaded the lava's flooded they're called flood basalts for a reason man the columbia basin is a low spot because of the weight of those lavas and this is a nice cross-section to show all sorts of things but tonight we're just looking at our thick pile so how thick is thick this is a new map so this is the first of many of these brand new maps i want to share with you this is a map of our our german chocolate cake but these are thicknesses this is an iso pack map so the lavas are in total the cake is a half a mile thick on this line a mile thick here two miles thick here and at about sunny side halfway between pasco and yakima more than three miles thick now how in the world do we know that it's the petroleum people it's the oil natural gas people doing all their drilling they spent so much money to get through all that worthless basalt so that they could finally get down to the rocks that would have the resources so these are some of the maps of their holes they drilled at rosa rosa dam in the yakima canyon they drilled saddle mountains a few places and the result of that drilling helped us understand that the yellow here are our flood basalts the depths of the flood basalts are different depths at different places but the real excitement here is that there's different rocks at different holes at different locations some of them swap sandstone some of the metamorphic rock of an exotic terrain that came in off of the ocean so this gives us real data to try to picture that pre-17 million year old landscape and these kinds of diagrams are trying to put that together it's a lost world essentially it's a it's a it's a whole landscape with mountains and valleys and different kinds of rocks that dominated our scene for a long time and now is just in prison it's under this german chocolate cake with no hope of getting out if i have to personalize rocks if we go deep enough we can actually get to the old craton if we're far enough east so we can get to an actual part of old north america that seems to make sense some of the lavas in the german chocolate cake have some sandstone in between them they're called interbeds the vantage sandstone is the most famous these are important because we get all of our water from these guys if you drill in any place where we have these flood basalts you're trying to get down to one of these interbeds to get water so thank you for the map jennifer hackett made all these maps she lives in the valley here she's on the school board she runs a little company called monash mapping dot com beautiful beautiful maps so here's jennifer getting us over to a place where we actually have islands that are not covered by love what's an example of one of these islands step toe butte thank you very much here it is so a mountain north of pullman south of spokane that's made out of quartzite that's pre-cambrian super super old hundreds of millions of years old surrounded by flood basalts that are capped with that wind-blown silt that lush i was talking about so here's a oh we got sound too here's a guy named christian sturm who flies drones and he's flying from the south to the north and we're getting a sense of the vast expanse of the flood basalts in all directions surrounding this mountain [Music] think of how many mountains like that are underneath the lavas a bunch of them but we've just got a couple like step two so that was pretty loud and i like the loud volume if that bothered you you're going to be really bothered now so this is our friend tom who's a bit of more of a daredevil so he's going to zoom by step to butte as well but this is going to be wilder music and wilder visuals you ready put your seatbelt on step toe butte right there all right we get it good so if we're on our side of the flood basalts we don't have step toes instead we have kind of wrinkle ridges where the lavas have been squeezed and warmed into ridges if you drive to yakima you go over ridges those are our lavas but the lavas have been folded like a linoleum like a like a kitchen rug on linoleum uh no idea okay great so let's go to this source that's really the thing that i want to hit the most with you and if you've got the rv idling out in the parking lot and you're ready to roll i can get you to some places that are at ground zero for these eruptions so these are what the maps look like in the literature they're not particularly sexy the colors are me just taking my little colored pencils and trying to figure out which crack goes with which lava flow it was fun but time consuming and i had a lot of help from a guy named andy miner put all these individual flows together that's that's the basis of these maps i'm about to show you but my god i can't send you out with a map like this there's this hard to read hard and this is all geophysical stuff from below the ground so we need maps that are a little bit more clear and that's where jennifer comes in so here's our lavas there are all of our feeder dikes together so if i only have five minutes to give this lecture i would just show that and say that's where the lavas came out but we're better than that right we know not all those cracks formed at the same time generally we know feeder dike down below curtain of fire up above spatter falling out of this uh frothing fountain and again the the curtain is what we want to have in our mind we're not light enough here to really see this well but we've got some orange lava coming up and we can see one of those initial phase eruptions where the lavas don't get very far these are the steen's lavas and the amnaha lavas let's skip this we can't see it very well skip now after each eruption we have a lunar-like landscape this is hawaii with no plants and animals on this featureless plain that's we can picture almost every one of these eruptions of our lavas we're pretty sure we have thousands of years at minimum thousands of years between eruptions this is not you know monday here comes one tuesday here comes one these fissures are making these lavas and there's enough time to develop a whole ecosystem before the next lava comes that's why we have petrified wood and other remnants of these older times this is way before the woolly mammoths this is way after the dinosaurs it's tough to put this into perspective time wise let's skip those they're too dark iceland this is the best i've got with modern videography to approximate our curtain of fire hell this could be walla walla going up to a freighter to make the ginkgo lava flow i'll show you a map in a second you know you're driving you got your skittles you just gassed up you got the kids fighting and you're seeing this out the window this was us this isn't some distant place this was us but of course today this is iceland so let's do this initial cracks the initial phase make some lavas just down in southeast oregon cool them off still in the initial phase make the amnaha lavas cool them off now the main phase right main phase get these guys to go all the way up to spokane up to upper grand coulee out to the oregon coast and then let's just keep rolling we're we're in a vibe now this is all waning phase totally this is three percent of the cake it's nothing but these are flows that affect us and if you come next week we'll talk about why these orange lava flows in some cases are so skinny why they're so worm-like and then they're flat and then they're worm-like again you can maybe figure it out on your own if you remember what the title is for next week vince in oregon sending lava to yakima and this last little guy just a little blip coming up right at tri-cities good so let's go to actual places where we can see some of those sources uh let's do this again yeah yeah yeah yeah and now grand ronde this is the main phase how can we find those feeder dikes well one way we can do it is to go to the wallawa mountains have you been this is down by joseph and enterprise that's one way to approach the wallawa mountains in the walawa whitman national forest is mostly light-colored rock the mountain range is mostly granite and limestone light-colored stuff and it makes it easy then to find our feeder decks because our feeder dikes are brown right we can find those squirts of lava coming up through and during the main phase we had that this was all underground of course at the time but we can find these feeder dykes this is all andy miner helping me out feeder dyke sticking just sticking out like a stegosaurus plate uh we did a backcountry trip this summer in the mountains i knew i was doing this lecture so i was we were on the hunt for these feeder dikes and they were pretty easy to find there's thousands of these feeder dykes each of the dikes are not very big you're like well geez that thing is going to feed a lava flow that goes out of the way to the coast no but if you have a hundred of these feeder dikes all active at the same time you can feed some pretty impressive lavas so feeder dikes there's one right here in the trees uh we have video of a feeder dike yeah okay so there's a waterfall there because of the feeder dike making that vertical resistant ledge so all through the wallawas a lot of the main phase feeder dikes well let's say you don't want to hike or you can't hike anymore my knees are shot too how about we drive we go to the grand ronde river canyon so here's one of the best tips i've got for you have you been on this road i hadn't been here until last summer you go to clarkston don't cross over to lewiston fine town i'm sure but stay in clarkston on the washington side state route washington state route 129 a souton annatone field spring state park and you're going to drop down to the grand round river canyon this is primal primo country or prime location for some of these beautiful feeder dykes each of these is a feeder dyke from the snake river all through the grand round river canyon and here's what they look look at this road putting this road in to get through this impressive german chocolate cake layer after layer after layer but once we get down to the river and we stop for some ice cream can you see that something different is right here it's a vertical layer of lava cutting across everything else that's horizontal we're right here on the map vertical cutting across horizontal these are the feeder dykes that i have known about for 20 years but they're impressive and they are resistant they stick out compared to the other parts of the cliff it almost looks like a like a firewood up behind your hat your cabin it's all stacked up like that so grand ronde river canyon a beautiful spot you can just hunt for these feeder dikes they're all over the place if you have your eyes tuned for this sort of thing beautiful the plumbing system of this fissure eruptions there's another one there there's another one there we got it right so we're building to what we're building to the spatter we want to go now to these newly discovered at least to us places where we can find where the lava came to the surface and fell out of the sky i'm ahead of myself we're still feeder dykes i'm getting i'm getting impatient i hope nobody from motor pools here you're not supposed to go off the pavement but i guess i did all right good we got it we got it we got it i mentioned now i mentioned good so uh we're now into the waning phase this is the ginkgo lava flow 15.4 million years ago a crack opens up running from ephrata to moses lake to walla walla that vent is there the spatter is there so if you drive i-90 right there at one of the moses lake exits you're going right through the curtain of fire 15.4 million years ago and look at this lava staying molten until it gets to the mouth of the columbia and a branch of this gets to yaquina head the ginkgo lava flow coming out of this crack at walla walla or even freda is getting to the oregon coast at newport oregon impressive impressive this is one of my favorites this is the rosa lava flow 15 million years ago tokyo you know where tokyo is yeah templin's country corners a little gas station like out of the 50s kind of a thing it's it's the first exit you have when you're heading east away from ritzville that's the bikes we want to cross the rosa vent wynonna and atone so this is what we visualize when we go out there we can do more than visualize okay you got something handy the esker ranch this is public land if you want to go find this spatter i'm about to show you you can go there it's a short hike you can drive basically right to it where we're halfway between ritzville and steptoe and you're like i've never been out there there are hardly any roads out there and you're right it's one of the most remote places in washington that i know of that's not high cascades and it's a really impressive stretch and why are we going to the eskier ranch we're going to find rosa spatter this stuff that came out of the air and by now i've built this up so much that it better be good otherwise you're going to be massively disappointed i'm a big dude you know but look at this pile of this is just one pile of spatter there's stuff that these orange globs that fell out of the sky and the vent is right next door so i went out there this summer with a guy named chris smart who works at central he's very gifted with a camera and with editing and this is the subject of one of these short videos that are now on television so let's give you that short segment but hey what about that giant volcano if it's not rainier where is it [Music] probably not where you'd expect less than 25 miles from ritzville and the freeway we've got our volcano this is it not a mountain a flat area in eastern washington that has evidence of an eruption 15 million years ago this is a fissure coming right through this area a deep crack i know you wanted a mountain but we got something different there's something in this picture that's unusual it's very rare that red stuff across the way that's volcanic spatter the fissure is right next door here magma coming out of the sky and falling right where i'm standing [Music] so this is a close-up look at spatter i mean it's it's basalt but it's like whipped butter it's like pumice that's dark colored you can imagine these globs of spatter just falling and then on the ground 15 million years ago and here's the resting place of a bunch of these guys there's tens of vertical feet of these globs that have just fallen and they're still relatively fragile and you can pull that right out here's another piece of spatter right here 15 million years ago this is ground zero for the volcanic activity spatter the star of the show that little episode these are five-minute episodes that are showing on pbs in yakima and in april they'll be showing in seattle so if we go back to hawaii we got many versions of what we were just talking about little miniature fissure eruptions with the spatter falling and these lava flows falling away from those i got a few more and we're done let's continue to present day that was the rosa we were just here at the spatter out at the escuer ranch there's debate to this day about how quickly we can get this lava covering this area with that particular rosa flow we were just looking at don swanson a very respected geologist who spent 50 years studying this thinks you can get that rosa flow in seven days in one week you can get it as far as let me just go back he thinks it takes just seven days to go from here to here all the way to the dalles and then get that stuff solidified it's tough to approximate this so there's others that think it takes months one guy thinks it takes maybe a dozen years or more so we'll maybe never know but there's maybe new attempts the rosa flow we were just looking at is also famous because it makes the beautiful columns of frenchman cooley and you've seen rock climbers if you've been to frenchman cooley that's the same flow that spatter we were just at that was the vent here's the lava being nice and thick and when it cools it cracks and forms these beautiful columns not every one of these lava flows forms columns and it's still a bit of a mystery as to why some some of the 300 layers in the german chocolate cake have beautiful columns others not so well plenty of others that just don't have columns at all an upper colonnade a lower colonnade and an entablature which is kind of a squirrely cracked zone in the middle they're all cooling cracks priest rapids flow actually buried a rhinoceros up in the grand coulee called the blue lake rhino that pre-laced pre-slave priest rapids lava flow made it to portland and if you've been to the vista house up above the columbia that cliff is this lava flow so the reason that that cliff is there is there was an old valley that was filled with our basalt lava of the priest rapids this is the umatilla flow coming into central washington this is the oh god a sultan i think i'm starting to lose my concentration here a little bit god if i am are you a couple of these i really like this is the pomona lava flow some of you know the pomona tavern maybe which is just uh just north of sila the pomona cracks opened up over here by orofino idaho skinny river of orange lava following the old salmon river i'm giving away some of the juice from next week then the lava spreads into a sheet flow bury central washington finds the columbia river valley funnels back down to it and gets all the way to the oregon coast amazing that's the pomona lava flow and this guy's my favorite the elephant mountain flow a vent down here in northern oregon it gets into a river valley and it pools here why is the elephant mountain my favorite of all the flows it's photogenic man the elephant mountain is a is a minor flow it's not very thick it didn't travel as far as the big boys but it has the most gorgeous columns and the flow is so thin that you can take people your age maybe some of you in the room were out with us we were out here in april and we were hiking even though many of us can't hike very well anymore and we climbed up to the top of the elephant mountain flow going up through these columns and getting up to the top it's a an accessible this is public land as well near othello washington so here's folks up there presiding over these beautiful columns and if you get up there and look at the tops of these columns they are so perfectly formed so beautifully cracked that's all cooling crack stuff that's really not the topic of tonight but i thought i'd include oh there people love this there's lots of talking right now look at that there's a crack good finishing oh you saw the hammer right and then this last little guy is the ice harbor eruption i know this isn't six but close enough this little guy the lava got hardly at all lewis and clark came down the snake and encountered a terrible rapids right here and that rapids existed why because that feeder dike was sitting right in the in the snake river so even lewis and clark were introduced to these columbia river lavas i love this diagram because it shows the feeder dikes are not going up to the same horizon and if you think about it that makes sense right here's an older feeder dike excuse me here's an older feeder dike feeding an older lava now we crack it again get a younger feeder dike in other words you've got to build the layers before you can crack them so that makes sense if you think about at least did for me thinking about that recently occasionally you find some pillows which are circular features found only at the bottom of some of these lavas these pillows tell us that the lava went into a lake of some sort went into some body of water of some sort so there's some details preserved there these are some of the best pillows i've ever seen at the base of the priest rapids flow in downtown spokane and this is just to the west of downtown and i think these are amazing because they're kind of three-dimensional it's not just a highway cut not every lava flow has the pillows at the base but if you find a pillow zone and then you're extra lucky and you're extra stupid you get in your vehicle you drive on the freeway you cross at ryegrass you're heading to vantage you pull quickly off to the shoulder you know that there's some holes you go crawl in the holes and you find petrified logs they're right there i'm not recommending this state patrol people will not be happy with me saying that but your zoom every time you drive to vantage on the freeway look for those holes down to the south side of the highway john lasher gave me that tip originally and if you crawl in there you can see those old logs and many of the logs that are now at ginkgo petrified forest state park and vantage were pulled out of those holes or holes like them in central washington uh finally we make the tie remember we did this early on we make the tie to the yellowstone hot spot watch this now we're today in yellowstone let's go back in time back in time back in time until that hot spot is in north northern nevada 17 million years ago there are problems but generally the timing of that hot spot being here makes sense for the hot spot story and also makes sense for our cracks propagating to the north and just in case you haven't seen this you've got a big plume head a mantle plume head that's upwelling and presumably feeding all this volcanic activity 17 to 15 million years ago the yellowstone story in case you can't picture it as this a stationary yellowstone hot spot a drifting north american plate and you have these incredible explosive calderas the biggest explosions we've had on planet earth all right here liz where you going all right it's my wife taking off she's had enough this is north america it looks like this thing's moving isn't it but it's not remember north america is moving this is southern idaho moving over the stationary hot spot that's what we visualize since the hot spot was in the northwest feeding the basalts i'd mention that these large volcanic regions where we have flood basalts are called large igneous provinces there's a wonderful book by richard ernst it's pretty technical but these are just some photos i'm too cheap to buy the book so i just took some photos out of the book each of these black splotches is a basaltic region a flood basalt region here's siberia here's india here's the pangaea flood basalts that are now of course separated by the movement of the continents but originally they were all together there are flood basalts in greenland there are flood basalts in siberia look at how much siberia is under basaltic lava that's the german chocolate cake in russia that's siberia looks like yakima canyon but it's the flood basalt of siberia india look at how much of india is buried in flood basalt many many more times the volume that we have here flood basalts in india look familiar to us but on a much larger scale and this is the best map i have for the flood basalts 201 million years ago when pangaea was together and then remember very quickly after this happens we split the supercontinent up and so that flood basalt region is now separated by thousands of miles of water of the atlantic ocean that event is partially responsible for the palisades along the hudson river near new york city uh let's skip that let's skip that let's skip that let's skip that and just point out before we quit that we have a brand new building at central washington university the geology department and the physics folks we're very grateful to have that building you are welcome to come up anytime and you'd go why would i come to a building well you we've got some display stuff there but we also have a classroom and my classroom is open to anybody for free anytime i'm teaching you are welcome to sit in here with these college kids and learn some basic geology about washington seriously so please if you haven't contact me if you like and come join us up there i want to thank you tonight for coming and i'll leave you with this clip involving my favorite flow the elephant mountain [Applause] thanks everybody

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 35,477

Keywords: Nick Zentner, flood basalts, Columbia River Basalts, Yellowstone Hot Spot, fissure eruption

Id: nAOhA5li7NE

Length: 62min 35sec (3755 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021