Hells Canyon and the Ringold Formation

[Music] well this is a lecture on Hell's Canyon and the ringgold formation now Hells Canyon you've heard of I assume it's why you're here we know where Hells Canyon is located it's the Snake River it makes up the state line between Oregon and Idaho great it's a deep canyon Hells Canyon but I also tonight want to talk about something called the Ringgold formation which is a bunch of sedimentary rock layers that I was bored to tears by until last year I had no interest in the Ringgold formation at all seemed like a bunch of boring lake beds and that's it but I now AM indistinctly curious about what's going on with the Ringgold and especially the researchers who have been working with the Ringgold formation you're like well where is that well it's close to home the Ringgold formation is in Central Washington and there is a connection between the details in the ring Ringgold formation white bluffs that's the Ringgold formation saddle mountains that's the Ringgold formation there's details that have been locked and hidden in the Ringgold formation that help us better understand Hells Canyon and you like okay I guess if that's the plan but I don't see how those two things go together at all and that's our hope tonight is that you'll see the connection before we quit now I've got sent this is a geology lecture right so I've got some basic geology questions about Hells Canyon why is that canyon there how long has that canyon been there why is it so deep why aren't all of our river canyons as deep as hell's canyon the the room got suddenly very quiet everybody's thinking now and that's what we want so about a year ago a year and a half ago I started thinking that it would be fun to put a lecture like that together and I knew very little about Hells Canyon and I gotta warn you right up front those basic questions have some answers but we still don't have all of the answers for those basic questions so this is one of those that I'll bring you up to speed on where we are in the literature and with the researchers but there's still work to be done with Hells Canyon and the ringgold formation okay so uh how many been to Hell's Canyon before ok maybe 300 of you or so yeah not everybody but but plenty you got to burn some calories to get in there right you can't just take a Sunday Drive through Hell's King and there's no road along the bottom of Hell's Canyon and the Snake River it's remote there's no Visitor Center at the rim with a big parking lot and Rangers telling you about the formation of Hells Canyon there is what the Grand Canyon of course so thankfully there are still some rugged remote places left and many of you go to Hells Canyon almost as a personal retreat the cellphone doesn't work at the bottom of Hells Canyon you can easily go back decades and get away from it all whether you're getting in there by jet boat or whether it's coming in from White Bird Idaho and coming in on some Forest Service dusty roads for miles and miles but you can get to the bottom of Hells Canyon and the various maze but you really got to work to get in there if you get in there and those of us that have we love it and maybe after tonight you'll be more motivated to go to Hells Canyon if you haven't been there before sounds like a terrible place by the way Hells Canyon what a terrible name why would you go to Hells Canyon or Death Valley or all these terrible sounding places you know but despite the name it's beautiful and we have plenty of visuals to share tonight but how can I get you more interested in Hells Canyon and the geology of Hells Canyon well I think many of you know this but maybe everybody does not did you know that Health Canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon and it's not even close we have a river canyon here in the Pacific Northwest that's 2,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona so I don't know if you've noticed up here but I've got a couple of side views of a couple of canyons have you figured out what they are this is the Grand Canyon in Arizona and this is Hells Canyon and generally the Grand Canyon is about six thousand feet deep depends on where your measure and Hells Canyon is eight thousand feet deep okay oh I didn't know that I can tell my people at the coffee place tomorrow all about Hell's Canyon being deeper well wait I got something better than that and this is the this is the observation that got me very fired up about this topic not only is Hell's Canyon deeper it's younger those two canyons are not the same age and the conventional age for Hells Canyon is half the age of the Grand Canyon so to review we have the Snake River digging a hole deeper than the Grand Canyon in half the time it took the Colorado River to carve its Canyon what in the world is going on and that place on the Pacific Northwest map that's what we're talking about tonight and you can see maybe why it's a work in progress there's lots of things that would contribute to that successful digging of the Snake River okay but this business about age of a River Canyon brings up a painful personal memory and I'd like to share that with you I'll make it quick this is 30 years ago I'm whitewater rafting in West Virginia of all places and you've been whitewater rafting before it's it's a fun experience you know you've got typically an inflatable raft and you got half a dozen people in your boat and there's a there's kind of a hippie dude you know in the back there your guide you know getting you through the the rapids you know guy or gal they got the leather bracelets and the puka shells and the hair and everything they're smart they know what they're doing they're kind of chill people and you know they're training you up on how to paddle and let's do the right side paddle and right side back and he'll all back you know and all that kind of stuff okay so we're in West Virginia 30 years ago I'm fresh out of grad school and feeling pretty good about myself pretty cocky and we're on a quiet stretch of the river between Rapids and the guys you know strikes up a conversation with the group and he says it's kind of ironic this is the new River but but it's the oldest river in North America this is the New River Gorge in West Virginia but it's the oldest river in North America and of course everybody's why do they call it the new river if it's the oldest river in North America and the guy says I get that question every time and nobody has an answer you know there's nobody who's figured out why it's called the new river there's ideas but nobody knows for sure and then my wife says well how do they know it's the oldest river and he's like I've never gotten that question before and my brother-in-law says well it's a good thing we got a geologist in the boat Nick why don't you tell this guy so I'm fresh out of grad school I'm feeling pretty good about myself I just start talking I start lecturing the whole group about the Appalachian Mountains and Ages of river canyons as I'm talking this is 1990 as I'm talking I realized I don't know what the hell I'm talking about like I sounded like a pretty basic question well how old is this river canyon or how old is the river but I was you know I don't know the answer to this question and I keep I'm still talking to these people in this boat so at the end of my little lecture I everybody's went like okay you know everybody knew I was full of right I didn't know what I was talking about so I swore from that moment on I would never be s yeah it's okay to say three words you know I don't know you can say those words and still be okay and we've all been in a room with somebody who's got all the answers so that was a life lesson for me but at the time I didn't know how they figured out how old the new river was and and I've been in geology a long time now so I have a decent idea and here's the basic message you can figure out the age of a river canyon if you leave the canyon if you're in the canyon it's very difficult to figure out the age of the canyon because what are we really saying when we say how old is a river canyon we're saying how old how old is the hole aren't we that's what we're trying to decide when did the river start to make the canyon it's got nothing to do with the age of the rock layers so let's use the Grand Canyon as an example these are ages in millions of years for the rock layers exposed in northern Arizona in the Grand Canyon you with me the Vishnu schist is at the Colorado river's way down there at the bottom in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon it's one thousand seven hundred million years old it's Precambrian it's very very old some of the oldest rocks in North America okay old rock does that mean it's an old Canyon well I don't know I the guy just said we got to leave the canyon for summer I don't even know what he meant by that that's you talking to your wife now or vice versa the youngest the Rimrock in the Grand Canyon is the Kaibab limestone it's 270 million years old so if we ask ourselves how old is this Canyon basically when did the Colorado River start to cut into the earth I think using these ages all we can say is what the canyon has to be younger than 270 doesn't it let's make sure everybody sees that have you ever thought about this when you're in River Canyon there's a wall and there's a wall you got matching river walls or canyon walls have you ever noticed that they match like it's sandstone limestone sandstone sandstone limestone say that's not an accident those layers used to be continuous right here's to B Illinois there was no Canyon there it was flat and those layers were intact and then the river started to cut down so even 270 million years ago we had a continuous layer of Kaibab limestone and all we can say based on these rock layers is the canyon the Grand Canyon is younger than 270 million years well that's not a very precise date sometime in the last 270 million years that's not very satisfying I feel like I need to cut to the chase and do something real the conventional answer for the age of the Grand Canyon is 6 million years 6 million years the Grand Canyon the Colorado River started to cut into the earth six million years ago it's a young feature compared to the age of the rock layers now the topic tonight is not the Grand Canyon it's Hells Canyon let's look at those ages interestingly the oldest rocks at the bottom of Hells Canyon younger than the youngest rocks of Grand Canyon right 270 and here we are 200 is this the Kaibab limestone it's not but it is limestone at the bottom of Hells Canyon the Martin bridge limestone and there's also some 200 million year old volcanic rocks from the South Pacific so that's another lecture we did an exam we did an exotic terrain lecture last year which bit off some of that but we could expand on that at some point so that's a whole nother topic but the point is we have two hundred million year old lime stones and volcanic rocks exotic terrains that came in from the ocean and docked at that location in the Pacific Northwest and that rock is 200 million years old most of the rest of the walls of hell's canyon are sixteen million years old the basalts of Eastern Washington our flood basalt the the basalts you see in the yakima canyon in the Columbia River Gorge on the way to Portland Grand Coulee etc so these are kind of familiar rocks to us and we've already discussed the flood basalts a fair amount what can we say about the age of Hells Canyon well it's younger than 16 million using the same logic we just used but we have a different answer a more precise answer the conventional answer for Hells Canyon is three million years remember I said the Snake River has taken half the time to dig a deeper hole so so far what if we said the age of Hells Canyon is three million years meaning the Snake River started to carve at that time like you've got to make the German chocolate cake and then you take out the knife and you make a wedge and you pull the wedge out and you give it to the birthday girl it's the wedge being pulled out that's happening very recently compared to when you made the cake same idea here so three million years that's not a lot of time and why here why was the snake so aggressive just in that spot to dig this deep hole it's not this deep other places along this okay let's make a quick little list of potential ideas and this is the loosey goosey part of the lecture meaning this is the part that needs more work but I'm going to throw out a bunch of ideas that have a bit of validity to them but they need to be fleshed out with more evidence I'll do it quickly is it possible that the rocks at Hells Canyon are softer than everywhere else well I don't know is the salt soft well it is kind of if you think of the salt in this manner many of us know that in eastern Washington the salt is heavily fractured there are a lot of vertical fractures basalt columns there's a lot of horizontal fractures I'm fond of saying basalt lavas our great flood basalt lavas are pre-cut and ready to be hauled off by a bunch of water so if that means soft to you I guess that can work that we've got a bunch of basalt that might be very easy to erode since it's already cracked up so much and by the way where are we challenged by the Snake River itself Snake River starts in Wyoming it goes Jackson Hole Idaho Falls Pocatello Twin Falls south of Boise here's the snake getting into Hell's Canyon here's the snake entering Washington Lewiston Idaho Clarkston and then tri-cities and then we joined the Columbia okay that's the snake that we're talking about so why in that one particular stretch we got the floor dropping out and making Hells Canyon so soft died soft rock we get into some basalts maybe that's part of the story if we go back a few lectures in this spring series the super-continent lecture do you remember we had old North America we had a very sharp boundary where the edge of the basement Rock of North America is located where was that well we said it was Spokane and sure enough that old edge of old North America and what's on the other side of this line a bunch of those exotic terrains that came of the ocean is it a coincidence that this deepest River Canyon is basically right on that old boundary there's a more formal geology name for that section of the old boundary called the Wiz the western Idaho shear zone so just think there's a structural there's a bunch of faults that are shifting a bunch of the bedrock north on the exotic terrain side it's a shear zone where there's been northward movement and basically I'm trying to say that there's some big faults in that area is there connection between the Wiz the western Idaho shear zone and the location of Hell's Canyon I'm going quick and you're like well what's the answer remember I told you all these are potential areas but we're not going to lock into one of these I'm going to lean towards one in just a bit is this an Ice Age story is there a bunch of meltwater coming off of the ice sheet well we're too far south for that the ice sheet is up here in northern Washington etc so that doesn't work but some of you know there was a big Ice Age flood that came through Hells Canyon it's called the Bonneville flood the Bonneville flood and we have a good date for it it's an Ice Age flood not the Missoula does it wasn't Ice Age floods that water that came from Montana its water that came from Utah from Lake Bonneville and there was a hell of a flood that got over Red Rock pass dropped in to Pocatello found the Snake River and followed the snake and a major Ice Age flood one big flood came through Hells Canyon 18,000 years ago 18,000 so a fraction of 1 million years so to say that Hells Canyon is 3 million years and then to say this Bonneville flood is why Hells Canyon is so deep is probably a stretch in fact we view Bonneville flood as more of a dumper than a cutter there's huge piles of Idaho rocks that are sitting in the floor especially in the planes of the hell's canyon floor but it doesn't look like that's a major cutter finally and those that have gone to other lectures know that I'm fond of this uplift intensifies erosion it's not that the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River it's not that the Colorado River is so powerful it's that northern Arizona is tectonic Li lifting and that is an accurate way to view northern Arizona that this canyon is here because starting six million years ago northern Arizona starts to get a little closer to heaven every year starts to tectonic Li uplift and the Colorado River tries to hold its position it aggressively cuts and that's the general view for many of the river canyons in Central Washington the Yakima River south of Ellensburg Washington is a river being their first tectonic uplift due to some folding that's accurate but I don't know if we can fall in love with this either at least in the way that I've discussed uplift in the Pacific Northwest before I'll do it quickly why is there uplift south of town right there is clockwise rotation the clockwise rotation we talked about last week the clockwise rotation that keeps coming up in many discussions involving earthquake potential and everything else in the Pacific Northwest these are arrows I'm doing it very quickly basically everybody's rotating around Pendleton Oregon this is something we've been able to document with instruments GPS receivers but northern Washington and British Columbia do not rotate so we're rotating everybody into a fixed northern Washington and as a result we are squeezing we are squeezing central Washington and have been for many millions of years what's the result big earthquakes on the saddle mountain fault the Menashe - ridge fault that the antenna fault the Toppenish ridge fault the Seattle fault as well as forming the ridges that you drive over when you go to Yakima that's all in response to that crustal rotation so why aren't I hitting clockwise rotation hard for the formation of Hells Canyon this didn't yes everybody is rotating around Pendleton Oregon Health Canyon is to the east of Pendleton how is this rotation having anything to do with Hell's Canyon development now it's clear we have the Blue Mountains and the Wallowa mountains and the Seven Devils mountains on either side of Hell's Canyon and those have clearly been lifted but I have not found the right person or the right scientific paper to for-sure document why that uplift here is happening and to me that's an unsolved part of this story I can't hold it because the energy is so great right now so I'm just gonna go for it a pet idea that I have been thinking about and it's come from a few little stray sentences and papers I've been reading and a few conversations with geologists is this is there a regional tectonic uplift event that we don't know about or don't know very much about is it possible that many of the river canyons in the entire Pacific Northwest are energized simultaneously what I'm saying is instead of the uplift and the incision of the Snake River being from clockwise rotation is there something more broad in Pacific Northwest land about six million years ago and about three million years ago coincident with these two numbers those numbers keep coming up and I'll show you some visuals to kind of play with that idea what I'm trying to say is it's possible in the next 20 years we may be able to build a case that the Yakima River and the Wenatchee River and the Palouse River and the Snake River etc Deschutes etc are all deciding to get aggressive at the same time that three million years ago and maybe also six million years ago because of an accelerated regional uplift that's tantalizing for many of us nobody's had the ability to kind of put that together in one major message okay I want to do one more thing with the chalkboard and then we'll go to the visuals thank you so much for the energy let's erase this and let's believe it or not use the supervolcano discussion we did last week like how in the world would that have anything to do with what we're doing now well the rest of the chalkboard is talking about the evidence we have for this number three where does that number come from you just pull that number out of a hat I said hat I couldn't you know three six you know where does though where does that number come from I mean it's just younger than sixteen but actually being specific about three and six what's the story there well I'll make it as quick as I can yes I will I'll make it as quick as I can so we know hell's canyon is here and you remember my quick offhanded message that if you really want to figure out the age of a river canyon you got to get out of the canyon so if we go downstream of Hell's Canyon we're suddenly at the Ringgold formation and if we go upstream of Hell's Canyon we're in southern Idaho and some lake beds called Lake Idaho so let's put two lakes on this map lakes that we know existed Lake Idaho Lake Ringgold the Ringgold formation are the deposits at the bottom of Lake Ringgold there's a bunch of beds at the bottom of Lake Idaho let's draw those very quickly there's about a thousand feet of sedimentary layers making up the Ringgold formation and we'll just say Lake Idaho there's a bunch of formal names but let's not do it we'll do this Lake Ringo now I got to be careful okay so this is LR and this is Lake Idaho and I you know what I need to do I need to get this out of here because one of the big messages is when we have these two lakes there is no Hells Canyon there is no Snake River coming through the area oh really yes if we go far back enough in time we can go earlier than the lavas we can scuse me we can go earlier than the cutting and realized there was a totally different geography so these sedimentary beds of the Ringgold formation go roughly between 8 and 3 million years and the sedimentary beds for Lake Idaho go 8 to 3 million years I'm going to change this and we'll put 2.8 up here at the top eight to two point eight eight to two point eight okay now I did a lecture two years ago called ancient rivers of the Pacific Northwest some of you were there for that and we talked about the Columbia River moving around in response to the great lavas pushing the rivers around and we used evidence like River cobbles and lava filled valleys and things like that put the lecture out there on YouTube a lot of people liked it I got an email from a guy named Jerry Smith he says I'm Jerry Smith from the University of Michigan I enjoyed that lecture but I think you could have used one more line of evidence to prove where rivers used to be you can use fish fossils I've spent the last fifty five years studying tiny fish fossils in Lake Ringgold and Lake Idaho and I can prove when Hells Canyon started to form in other words when the Snake River used to show up on this map at three million years ago so we'll do it quickly on the chalkboard we'll do it again with the visuals Jerry Smith and others looking at fish fossils in these two sets of lake beds you've got it now right we've got lake here and we've got a lake here what are we seeing in those lakes between 8 and 3 million years we have fishes that say Lake Ringgold was warm water and was isolated isolated from who isolated from the other Lake I'm no fish person I know nothing about fish I'll show you some pictures but that's about it but we'll take Jerry's word for it with the specialists that you can study fishes from this time and this time same time and there's no evidence if the fish is swimming between those two lakes that's important to us tonight isn't it if you're not fishing if you're if you're not swimming between these two lakes you got no river between the two lakes but what happens at three million years ago now three million years ago between three and 2.8 million years ago the same fish fossils are in both basins and the fish thrive in cold water and we have salmon now coming from the Pacific Ocean and getting into both of these places in other words we have warm fishes separate warm fishes no conditioned connection between the two and then starting at three million years ago we have the Snake River showing up and not only showing up but starting to dig to start our health Canyon creation so that kind of regional story can be told from these teeny tiny little fragments of little fishes among other things and that's where we've added Jerry Smith work to some of this other stuff now I promised the hotspot stuff and the super volcano stuff I got to do that real quick and then I promise we're going to the visuals here's the last little part of this if I pick eleven point eight million years ago who's got a good memory why is that date significant eleven point yes the eleven point eight million years ago from last week that was the huge supervolcano explosion in southern Idaho does anybody remember it now right it's right here and as from that Bruno Jar bridge explosion eleven point eight million years ago had 30 feet of ash fall out of the sky in Central Washington that was the cougar point tuff that we discussed last week why in the world are we going to this now the answer is this is a cross-section now this is a little picture here on the side if you have Idaho this is the Sun this is a person eleven point eight million years ago if you have Idaho sitting on top of a hot spot that portion of Idaho is going to get heated up it's a hot spot beneath that portion of Idaho what's going to happen to that portion of Idaho it's going to be heated up and it's going to be expanded we're going to have thermal expansion of that section of Idaho we're going to have a temporary dome where the hot spot is located why is that important to us tonight well if you have a temporary high a topographic high aren't you going to have rivers draining away from that temporary high so that fits right into our story because when we had the Yellowstone hotspot located here we had a continental divide just like we today have a caldera and a and that Continental Divide at Yellowstone Park that means eleven point eight million years ago we had rivers draining to the Atlantic Ocean east of the Continental Divide and some rivers according to Jerry Smith's fish work going down the Sacramento River to Central California and we sure as hell didn't have the Snake River coming through health canyon we're starting to form the lake at eight million years ago so let's do this let's jump to eight million years ago now the hot spot is at Twin Falls we've moved the Continental Divide a little bit we still have our Lakes going this way we still have the Columbia doing this but we're gonna start forming a small Lake Idaho and the small lake Ringgold and we're probably going to have some kind of little divide between those two lake basins let's jump ahead to three that's a magic number for us tonight three million years ago now the hot spot is approaching Yellowstone Park the Continental Divide has shifted again and now our Lake Idaho has become very large that's too large it's become large and Lake Ringgold has become large as well so at three million years ago we begin the incision of Hell's Canyon is it simply getting Lake Idaho too big to finally fill and spill over this divide and start forming Hells Canyon or is it more of a tectonic story to eventually get rid of these lakes and to get our Snake River story and to get Hells Canyon to begin you can see there's a lots of things going on with this and it's difficult to have one person to have a grasp on all these different areas of all these different specializations but we're getting closer to figuring that out I don't want you to leave and here's one way to do it in the last five minutes of our visuals we're gonna have a brand new scientist show up on the scene Lydia sheesh and she has new evidence from the Ringgold to suggest that maybe Hells Canyon is older than three million years now how could you leave after that kind of a teaser well I think we need some visuals I think we need some beautiful pictures and I think we need a few maps that might help us a little bit I think we need a little bit more fleshing out of some of those ideas I know it went quickly thankfully if you watch on YouTube you've got a pause button you can sit there and think about it for a while and then move on but not here I don't think there's a pause button on on me or from your seats so Grand Canyon how old six million years old saying the Colorado River started to dig that hole here's Grand Canyon from Google Maps here's Health Canyon from Google Maps they look different I'll grant you I mean Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder I don't know which one is more beautiful that one's a national park one of the seven wonders of the world and here's us in the Pacific Northwest or right uh we did this on the chalkboard there it is in living color the age of the rock layers did not help us very specifically with the age of the canyons more Google Maps from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and on the Idaho side an amazing place with alpine lakes up at the Seven Devils mountains have you been up there it's amazingly Alpine scene and yet you can drop all the way down the 8,000 feet down to the river so I joined a field trip three years ago with Basel tinkoff from the University of Wisconsin I learned an amazing amount about that area and here's the old road that we took from White Bird Idaho we were camping near there hammer great I think it was called and then followed this old dusty gravel road from the east and got ourselves down to Pittsburg Landing so here's at least one stretch of Hells Canyon you may know very much much more about more stretches this is the main stretch that I know from geology trips I saw this in Lewiston Idaho last month it's an amazing place and of course part of the allure is how remote and how few people there are out there now if you're willing to jump to this area for just a second thank you for doing that number one this is the Yakima River Canyon just south of Ellensburg and for more than a hundred years people have been looking at beaver tail bend and I'm happy to say beaver tail Bend still exists this is just this past winter Jesse Peters captured the beautiful shot we had a very tough February if you weren't with us here in Central Washington but he was out on a cold night capturing this and a more classic shot from Tom Foster showing these amazing River meanders that have incised into the local basalt lava flows what's the general message those flows used to be flat they got folded and as you fold those ridges you form the canyon and as I've been teaching for a long time now it's the clockwise rotation of Northern California western Oregon and western Washington against the stationary northern Washington and Canada that's responsible for the squeezing uplift and digging of the Yakima River to form the Yakima River Canyon that's on the loop obviously but if we look at it more artistically this is the Roza area of the Yakima River Canyon there's Burbank and then Eaton's Ranch is up towards the top well again this is on a loop and we can see that if the Yakima River Canyon is about six million years old and it is we've had this kind of gradual uplift we think gradual uplift over the last six million years for the Yakima River Canyon but you heard one of my big points tonight I don't see how that is the story at Hells Canyon if we tie the uplift of Hell's Canyon and the uplift of the well ours and the Blue Mountains and the Seven Devils mountains I don't see how we can tie that to the clockwise rotation mostly because of the location of Hell's Canyon being further east than most of them that motion I mean these shots amazing of by Hells Canyon this is the Grand Ronde River Ken you can see the same kind of amazing meanders that have been sized this is really tectonic geomorphology we're talking about tonight trying to understand why rivers dig when they do that's one aspect of it and this is what I was trying to say with you all is there some sort of regional tectonic story involving uplift involving some sort of change in the oceanic plates offshore that our most agree that the Ocean plates are driving the clockwise rotation so have we figured out the history of the Juan de Fuca plate in the Pacific plate at these two times in history to see if there's some sort of regional story that most of us are unaware of at the moment yeah I know this is very fuzzy but Andy miner who's been a very helpful geologist with not only this lecture but most that I've put together down here he lives in Cleveland and he sent me this these are images very sketchy images of sediments off the shore of Washington and Oregon and the main thing to notice here is that there's a major unconformity there's a major change between the folding of some of these older sediments and the guys that are the layers that are above the red line are not folded at all if you see this in geology an unconformity represents some sort of tectonic event some sort of uplift and erosion story so even offshore perhaps there's a record of this either six million or three million year change in the tectonic story so this is the lecture that I did two years ago that I was talking about and I'll summarize some of the main points from that I focused on the Columbia River having this weird bend to it and wondered why it had a weird Bend and we decided in that lecture it was the great lavas that came out of these cracks that pushed the Columbia River west of Ellensburg for a time pushed the Columbia River west of Goldendale for a time and it's the lavas coming out of these deep fissures that's responsible for that this is roughly 16 million years ago you've seen this already floods of lava completely changing the river story and the topography of Eastern Washington and after most of those lava flows we have this lifeless featureless plain if you get to the Grande Ronde River Canyon or other places where the rivers have dug more recently you can see those layers stacked one on top of another the German chocolate cake that's three miles thick in the middle of it near tri-cities and the Columbia River has decided to leave where it was pushed and at least south of Wenatchee the Columbia River has decided to return to the central part of these great lavas why because the weight of those great lavas have depressed Washington have depressed the crust below sea level and water flows to the lowest spot you heard it here first water flows downhill aren't you glad you came so here's a map of where those great lavas are found here's the Snake River this is a map of today not in the past here's Ontario you leave i-84 and health canyon up through near Riggins etc and the Salmon River coming in so notice the Salmon River is coming into the Snake River today and it's the Snake River that's coming up through southeastern Washington got it that should look familiar to you this is today well let's go back a few million years this is a familiar looking map in general but notice this is the Salmon River ten million years ago and the Snake River is not in Washington at the time and we know that was the Salmon River because of these River rocks these Red River rocks that came from the Seven Devils mountains this is the lecture a couple years ago I'm just reprising a few of these major points so these beautiful spuds these are actual River rocks and these are baked these are potatoes from our kitchen these actual River rocks are the size and shape of potatoes and they tell a story of rivers change in their position and if you have Red River rocks you have the old Salmon River coming into Washington at a particular time this is up above when Lulla gap in tri-cities the Salmon River coming through this area between ten and eight million years ago Salmon River you want more evidence that there was the salmon and not the snake and therefore we don't have Hells Canyon at this time we have this famous place near colobus where we have three different lava flows of three different ages that actually float down a river canyon the Salmon River Canyon so we have fossilized river valleys by lava flows filling those old valleys the evidence is beautiful and then of course there's the famous blonde quartzite River cobbles that tell the story of the old Columbia if you find a bunch of blonde quartz you know that's the Columbia coming through your property at some time in the past like this video clip akima these are blonde mostly blonde colored river rocks in fact some of these guys have been sitting next to each other for eight million years until this morning these are court sites from the Rocky Mountains the Columbia River brought these in there can be no other way these rivers get rocks got here so that was the emphasis of that lecture two years ago the Columbia River the Salmon River and I purposely ignored the snake and Hells Canyon at the time because I didn't know any of that stuff but I did have a few maps that I snuck in and that's what caught the eye of the geologist that saw that lecture and they said hey hey hey hey hey you got the Snake River coming through this area during the time of the lava flows I think you're missing the boat on that you should talk to Jerry Smith about his fish fossils and so that is kind of where I started this lecture about a year and a half ago what can I find out about the old Snake River system Hells Canyon and Jerry Smith's work so I taught a geology 351 class last spring every Wednesday we went out from one o'clock until sunset and we went to different places and our theme for last spring was to go to as many places that had ringgold like beds as possible to learn this story so we started by going down to Granger where those big cobbles are located an old grandpa Karl here Karl Hulbert is in the audience tonight from Granger has been very generous with his time and his place to open up for anybody who wants to come and learn about his place his place is important it's where the old clay pits are located they used to have a brick factory down there but it's the clay beds that were not my interest it was the river cobbles the river cobbles that help tell the story of which river was here at which particular time and the next few days I came back with my geology 351 students and we said well we're just starting out while we head up here and take a look I'm not even sure what we're looking at I'm talking to my students now can we climb up there and make a few cross-sections and try to figure out that the variation in the rock layers here which are sand and which are rivers and I just assumed at the time it was the Ellensburg formation that we were looking at so you know that occasionally I post on Facebook not my private stuff but I like to use it for geology and so I posted this after that trip that night after I took the Vans back tomorrow pool sitting in the van you know posting on Facebook and said hey had a good afternoon with my students out at the Ellensburg formation near Granger and Bruce B or instead a geologist in Tri City said I don't think that's Ellensburg for me I think that's Ringgold formation I don't know why you call it the Ellensburg formation and to most people who cares but to us we do care because if it's Ringgold the source of the Ringgold sediment is coming from the Hells Canyon area as opposed to calling it the Ellensburg formation which means those are things coming from the Cascades which is a totally different story so the Ringgold formation is all this sediment that sits on top of the basalts that's why I never really cared about the Ringgold before I was interested in the basalt lavas all that dirt sitting on top I didn't care about but now if I realized that there's details in the Ringgold that help us understand the Hells Canyon then I'm all-in so where can we go find the Ringgold well we can go to this old town side of white bluffs along the Columbia River here's a beautiful shot taken by Tom Foster he's standing on top of saddle mountains looking south so he's got the white bluffs on the left he's got tri-cities in the distance and here a couple of the reactors at Hanford on the right side of the photo now there's ice age stuff out there and white bluffs as well let's ignore that if we can please we just want to look at the Ringgold portion of white bluffs and there's an amazing flat top to this pile of a thousand feet of Ringgold sedimentation some of it below river level actually and suddenly we have respect for these layers at least I do because it's that Lake Ringgold that we were talking about that's part of this Hells Canyon story but not the Hells Canyon yet right if we have Leigh Kringle to have these layers at the bottom of Lake wrinkled we are pre Snake River pre Hells Canyon creation what can we find in these layers of wrinkled formation to help us with the development and the timing of Hells Canyon Oh a backpack Oh a van key and some interesting sedimentary structures again I go to Facebook I say oh I take my students down to white bluffs and there's a guy from David Greene from Wapato says I used to collect fossils there white bluffs and I'm like you're kidding what did you find where were you in the white Bluffs wearing the ring gold in other words he said I found camel sloth horse beaver squirrel giant Irish elk Rhino Mastodon antelope badger they were all are disarticulated there's a specific layer that produced all that vertebrate material one layer in the thousand feet of Ringel well I went down and visited with David at his home he showed me all has wonderful fossils that he had collected before the Hanford Site became protected and this is a camel bone pulled right out of one particular layer in the ringgold here are some little vertebrae of something or other I'm not much of a biologist obviously that turned me on to a report by a guy named Gustafson from University of Oregon who looked at those that vertebrate layer in the Ringgold and this is the cover of it bulletin number 23 the vertebrate faunas of the Pliocene Ringgold formation there's another mystery if you keeping track of mysteries why are all these vertebrate fossils just in one horizon within this thousand feet of Ringgold and why are all the bones screwed up why don't we have intact carcasses so by taking that report and Buren's dad's unpublished work from the Hanford Site and Newcomb in 1958 in Lindsay in 1996 I made this generalised stratigraphic column of a thousand feet of Ringgold sitting on top of the elephant mountain basalt and the main point for you is that there's hardly anything in the Ringgold formation to get a date from very difficult to figure out where we are in time so that's another major challenge if we can find some key grains in the ringgold which we're about to do with lydia we need to figure out when those grains were brought in I'm a little ahead of myself but I just wanted to keep us going here a little bit those red stars are the horizon where David and Friends kept finding the fossils so we brought a group of many of you guys out there last spring and David was along David's in the beard there so he had a bunch of things to say to the group and they really enjoyed that so it's kind of fun after the trip they said it really enjoyed that fossil guy your stuff not so much but that fossil guy I really enjoyed and there's places you can get your hands dirty right there in the ringgold along the white Bluffs wonderful old Mastodon molars etc of course it's interesting stuff it's very different from our normal routine in geology well here's a little bit on Jerry Smith the specialist with the fish fossils I've had emails back and forth but basically his first email to me back last spring was fish have some utility to be a fourth line of paleo River evidence because of their tight restriction to water and that has proven to be true that his work his long career with these fish fossils have really helped us so digging through these papers with all this biology is very difficult for a guy like me but I kept reading through kept emailing him he was very patient with me and I got at least the gist of his story it turns out one of the exposures of the wrinkled that has been good for him was not at white bluffs but closer to Othello on the north side of the saddle mountains that's still Ringgold there so some of you may know if we're up on top of the saddle mountains it's Ringgold formation at the very top it's the same stuff as the white bluff the white Bluffs are up there in the upper right can you see them so those white blood though white layers continue to the summit of the saddle mountains but here is the Ringgold again right at Smyrna Smyrna bench if you know crab Creek there there's a fixed section of Ringgold to study there and there's some cows and it's this spot that's been most helpful to the fish people an exposure of the Ringgold formation at a spot called Taunton and you're like I've never heard of that well that's where the Milwaukee railroad was put through just to the west of Othello you might know it now it's just south of 26 and that has been a very convenient place to sample for all these tiny fish fossils why would you do that again what's the whole point you're trying to figure out the Snake rivers history and the source of the material in those lakes and the temperature of the water and whether there's a connection to the ocean or not well let's take a look at some of these fish fossils this will be fun there's Grandpa Carl let's go check this out well there you go there's a fish fossil for you I mean look at the scale on these things these are from Jerry Smith scientific papers that's a millimeter so talk about painstaking work to sift through all this sand and silt and find these little broken pieces of different fishes and try to figure out the conditions and Lake Ringgold and Lake Idaho and realize there's different species in both of those lakes between 8 and 3 million years ago this is amazing level of precision and detail that feeds into a regular regional story yeah I know what that is that's a fish head even in Nevada there are some of these lake beds so it's more than just a Snake River story you can connect these old Lake basins before there were through going rivers and through many of these inter Montaigne areas but here's the main point I was trying to drive home on the chalkboards if it didn't work for you then maybe it will work for you now thousand feet of sediment in Central Washington thousand feet of sediment in southern Idaho two different lakes two different isolated lakes this is a map from Lydia who we'll talk about in just a second no Snake River between them no Hells Canyon between them the evidence is we have fishes in this lake that are totally separate from different kinds of fishes in the other lake before three million years ago despit species and I wish I could give you all the names like sunfish and all these fishes that that don't need cold water and don't need migration to the ocean are thriving in those two separate Lakes but suddenly between 3 million and 2.8 million years ago things change dramatically the same fishes are in both beds there's salmon coming from the ocean somehow and the interpretation is it's the Snake River that's bringing that's allowing that connection between these places so it's time for some professional diagrams 16 million years ago we have a hot spot in Northern Nevada that red dashed line is the Continental Divide we have green rivers flowing away from that Continental Divide we've got the flood basalts coming out of those fissures no Hells Canyon no Snake River moving on Oh fourteen million why is the hotspot moving most of you know this the hotspot is not moving it's North America drifting to the southwest over the stationary hotspot we still don't have our lakes we still don't have the Snake River but now we get these to what look like hearts Lake Ringgold and darker orange and Lake Idaho in lighter orange with a little divide in between the two remember now between 8 & 3 million years ago those are isolated basins we continue to drift the hot spot which means we change the drainage patterns change the rivers I mean it's 4 million years ago we still don't have much that looks familiar do we I'm gonna hit one more click of the advancer here you ready yeah it happened that quote-unquote quickly 3 million years ago we capture the whole scene and then by the time we get to today we've got the Snake River coming from Jackson Lake in Jackson Hole and the Yellowstone area okay we're almost done but I have to be complete with this lecture here's the new kid on the block she replaced ray wells who work for the USGS for 35 years she is good she is smart she is young and she is turning this story on its head and that's healthy if you are willing to accept all the new information coming in which most of us do so here's the main message from Lydia Stice work she's done just in the last two years and it's ongoing work Lydia says look I've been studying the Ringgold with my techniques and I've got sand in the Ringgold that's eight million years ago from the Snake River plain in southern Idaho now let's pause and just check this out before we quit what is she saying she says she has sand grains that are clearly according to her work we'll look at her evidence from the Snake River plain and those sand grains were brought to Central Washington and dropped into Lake greengold eight million years ago why are we pausing about that up until this point of the lecture we've said that we don't have a Snake River coming through Hells Canyon until three million years ago right this is the new exciting development that's stirring the pot a little bit how is it possible if those truly are grains of sand from the Snake River plain how did they get here if not through Hells Canyon is there another option so she got interested in the ring gold by accident her first major project newly hired was to work on the saddle mountains fault she's based in Menlo Park down in San Francisco but it was decided she was going to work on the saddle mountains fault and figure out what kind of seismic risk we have here at Beverly and she's working with layers that are exposed on both sides of the fault the ring gold so she did what she could to learn about the ring gold primarily to say something meaningful about the saddle mountains fault which crops out right above the Smyrna bench and has been a very active fault in the past still unclear how worried we should be about the future but it's an active fault and she published on that saddle mountains fault and got that out there and feel like everything was fine but then she said well wait a minute I started finding all this interesting stuff in the ringgold so I'm going to shift my focus and that's where she is now I want to learn more about this Ringgold because I'm finding stuff that doesn't belong here it's too old for the conventional story of three million years so she now has presentations like this Ringgold formation sedimentology implications for the ancestral rivers of the Pacific Northwest basically talking about Hell's Canyon development so turns out she came up to Ellensburg to give a talk right in the middle of when I was doing this 351 class so that was convenient and I said well you know I've been out looking at this stuff what have you learned Lydia and she says well I've been sampling zircons these little very durable grains that are in the sands of the Ringgold and she can get a lot of information out of those zurk ons details about not only the ages of the zircons but the source of the zircons where did those sand grains come from this is an exciting new technique that's been used so you can find a certain zircon and trace it back to a particular watershed someplace upriver where the sand grain was brought to this is a powerful technique well back to grandpa Carl I say well we got to go down and check out Grandpa Karl's place he's got a bunch of sand that's in the Ringgold and I was all upset to bring her up to all those river cobbles I figured she'd want to deal with that and she said no I got what I need right here she pulled out a ziploc bag and just grabbed a bunch of sand it's the sand in the ring gold with the zircons in it that what is meaningful to her and it's what's going to unlock this new story if it does become a new story in the next few years Lydia had a summer field assistant forget what her name was sorry about that she had another field assistant very cute dog that's with her at all times she operate in style this is her teardrop trailer that she camps in so she's uh she's got a lot going on and the Pacific Northwest is her domain so we did climb up through Karl's layers grandpa Karl's layers this is again snipes mountains south of Granger and there's beautiful old blocks of petrified wood that have been tumbled through there that's a whole nother story but later that day Lydia gave a talk at Central some of you were there for that talk on her work with the Ringgold formation and using these zircons to try to figure out the source of the sand now these are difficult things to read but she basically has been sampling sand in modern rivers across the Pacific Northwest here's the Yakima River Okanagan River matau etc and she's got a particular signature from those grains and where those grains are coming from and then she compares it with the zircon signals in the ring gold and tries to compare Ringgold sands with modern river sands and make a statistical case that many of the sands that she has in the lower Ringgold are coming from the Snake River plain so she's making maps like this now with all these rivers and here's our hot spot tract and the super volcanoes from last week the tsimko volcanic snare Goldendale are part of this but poorly understood at least by me at the moment and here's a map of where she is sampled in green she's femoral inand 2018 other spots of different colors she's sampled at different locations so this is an ongoing project and potentially I'm trying to say here is that our our crucial understanding of the age and development of Hells Canyon may be changed from the three million year date if she continues with this work and makes it agreeable to all these are the last two maps Lydia currently has a couple of models this is not her final decision but a couple of working models let's look at this is it possible to get sand from southern Idaho to Othello let's say in Washington without using Hells Canyon you see what she's doing here she's wondering if it's possible to have a salmon river route to get sand grains from the Snake River plain and come up this my old thesis area between the beaver heads in the Lemhi range and then continuing up into Lake Ringgold that's a potential so it could be that the three million year date is accurate for Hells Canyon if this is borne out with the data or is it possible Hells Canyon is much older than three million years and we have our lake beds with limited circulation between the two lakes but possibly can we get those sand grains to come through Hells Canyon as early as 8 million years ago if that's true then Hells Canyon is 8 million years ago at least and we got a lot more time for the Snake River to dig and a lot more time for uplift and it's a whole nother spin on the whole thing so the Snake River and in fact all the rivers of the Pacific Northwest are telling a story not only of Canyon development but regional uplift across the whole region and I love this shot from Lynn Weisenfeld near Hells Canyon in the Grande Ronde scene with the Columbia River basalts and our familiar looking rocks with this deep level of cutting by many of the rivers in the Pacific Northwest I want to thank you all not only for coming tonight but for coming to all four of these lectures this particular month of beautiful April here in Ellensburg Washington hey we'll see you next year okay thanks everybody thank you much [Applause] you

Channel: Central Washington University

Views: 56,359

Rating: 4.9298244 out of 5

Keywords: hells canyon, geology, ringold formation, river canyon, hells canyon geology

Id: wxg6124BpZw

Length: 64min 34sec (3874 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AJC1973]

I do love all of his videos

[u/h_trismegistus]

Did Nick Zentner post this? Big fan of your work in science communication. Dig the podcast too.

FYI I collected all of your videos I could find (110 of them) in the Earth Science Online Video Database I started.

If you guys like this lecture... check out the database and search or filter by "Nick Zentner" to see the other 109. The entire DB is up to 4,062 videos totalling over 2,932 hours of content now.

[u/WormFarmer64]

Nick is amazing, great videos and local to us. He's got just the right way of getting and keeping you interested with his talks. His alternate channel is Huge Floods as well as a few from local colleges hosted on their channels as well.

[u/brehew]

Great work