Nick On The Rocks - Season 3 Premiere

wonderful we're gonna get right to it thank you so much Linda for all of your guidance you came up with the idea for this program this series and we're all grateful to you Chris we will feature quite a bit this evening and a star of the show is up here in this suitcase and I'll tell you about the star in just a second but we're on the inside of this program I hope you have one or can look on with a neighbor and these are the six episodes we are going to view this evening in order from top to bottom that's convenient the first one is Diet tied to something called Lake Lewis and you're like I don't think I know where that is and it's because Lake Lewis doesn't exist anymore it's a lake that existed during the Ice Age down by tri-cities Southern Washington and there's beautiful evidence for that Lake without further ado let's view the Lake Lewis episode it takes about five minutes and then we'll have a little bit of Q&A if you've got some questions if you've got some comments and we'll just try to keep this thing moving there's six of these five-minute programs we're going to view so we're just going to try to keep it rolling the best we can are you ready in the back yeah man we're gonna do Lake Lewis episode that's going to premiere tonight on television at eight fifty eight forty-five by the way so here we go nobody has seen this yet you'll be the first to see it crack the mysteries of the earth discover the energy that drives a planet and builds mountains uncover buried treasure and see what makes mountains blown find out what shapes the top of the earth and explore the secret world below with me Nick on the rocks this main street of Zillow Washington probably known best for its agriculture there's orchards and vineyards surrounding the town but geologists know gsella because the little town sits directly on top of evidence from giant floods that happened 16,000 years ago but instead of loud angry destructive floodwater like at dry falls the lake beds here at gsella were created when each fast-moving Missoula flood was stopped cold temporarily by will Lulla gap near the tri-cities why the water couldn't all get through the gap at once so there was a backup when the Missoula flood water finally drained to the Pacific what was left one Ice Age lake bed a record of an Ice Age flood but look along the Yakima River at Zillah there are over 30 lakebed stacked one on top of another and here at Granger along the Yakima River and here at white bluffs along the Columbia River count up the lake beds and you count up the number of Missoula floods all the way from Montana at Burlingame Canyon near Walla Walla there are 40 bits amazing when did this happen we only have one date so far and the date doesn't come directly from the lake beds this is volcanic ash white with a bunch of gray layers above and below what's going on looks just like the ash of Mount st. Helens in 1980 it is Mount st. Helens it's not 1980 this is much much older this has been dated at sixteen thousand three hundred years ago that's the level of precision that we can get from this ash and this ash is important to us because this is the only place we've got in the Lake Lewis Basin to know exactly where we are timewise and the sharp definition is important telling us this was a momentary eruption of ash in a place where we did not have lake water but we certainly had a lake before and after multiple times Bruce Bo instead a geologist and author based in tri-cities has devoted 40 years to studying the ice age floods in Eastern Washington in addition to the lake beds he has worked with stranded boulders in the desert that snapped the details of Lake Lewis into sharp focus the river behind me is a 300 feet elevation the elevation of this erratic is about a thousand feet so if you do the math that's seven hundred feet of water that once filled in this valley that will look out by an ice age flood it's an angular which is a sign that was probably embedded in an iceberg the ice melted away leaving behind the erratic that we see today Lake Lewis lasted only a few days but still that was enough time to create these fascinating lake beds multiple ice age floods a strong stamp of water out here in the deserts of Eastern Washington [Music] ok look at this guy right here that's Chris smart don't sit down don't sit down so that's Chris smart right here keep standing please Chris smart soak it in soak it in Bruce Bjorn stead the guy that we probably interviewed for I don't know 25 minutes and ended up with less than a minute on screen Bruce would you stand up please and Neil took a truck and loaded all of us up and all the camera equipment and drove us to the top of Lula Gap Neil where are you Neil came up from tri-cities Neil with this truck so last year if you came we did a little bit of back and forth about what you liked and what you didn't like and we just kept it moving and I'd like to do some of that but we can also just ask a question these are appetizers aren't they most of you are hard core geology buffs I know that because you've come to a lot of our stuff and we're obviously we're just scratching the surface so are there questions that naturally come to mind where you want more information or was there an image that you're particularly excited about or have you got something negative to say we'd love to hear that too not really but go ahead if you want to Marty yes you heard the question the question was that ass bet is intriguing why is it so perfect is that ash that fell out of the sky from an eruption of Mount st. Helens after one of those lakes and then the lake dried away the ash came down but when the next lake came in why didn't that ash get swept away the key concept is the water was quiet at that spot Lake Lewis is truly dead calm water it's and that's maybe something we could have done better upstream further north the water was coming over dry Falls and doing that crazy velocity thing but when you're at Benton City which is where we did that little that little ash bed thing it's right there next to the road the water is dead calm so there was no neuro civ energy to take that thing away anybody else curious about anything that you saw yes yes we know the depth to the basalt bedrock at most of those places with the chalky white layers and you would think it shouldn't be that hard if there's a dozen chalky white layers in one place like we showed and 40 in that that queer Canyon called a Burlingame ravine there while a while can't you just like count up the number of layers and figure out how many floods there were the problem is which layers are which these layers are so difficult to distinguish and geologists like Bruce Bjorn stead and others have been trying to come up with new techniques to figure out how to correlate these things all across the Pacific Northwest a couple of others could before we move on to the next question the next episode yes how do we know the lake only lasted a few days at a time and that was one of the messages that each of those thick layers was from a lake that existed for less than a week there's a couple ways to answer it one is involving math and the size of the deposits and the size of the lakes and how much time it would take to drain the water because that lake existed because of this narrow will Lulla gap and I think of Lake Lewis like a bathtub full of water with an been drained and so you only have a certain amount of time before that water is going to totally drain out of the out of the bathtub a more satisfying answer might be there are no old shorelines where the high water of Lake Lewis used to be some of you know about Missoula Montana and you can actually see on the cliff above the University of Montana you can see these old shorelines of these glacial lake Missoula there are very few places you can see any shorelines and so that's more evidence that that lake didn't last for very long maybe a few days is pushing it maybe it's a couple of weeks for one of the lakes Bruce three weeks Bruce likes he's likes that number here's one more how do you date the layers without organic material we can't we still don't have a way to date the individual Lake Lewis chalky white layers those are still unable but the ash we can get a date for because there are minerals inside of the ash that came from Mount st. Helens we know they asked came from Mount st. Helens because there's a chemical fingerprint of that ash which matches perfectly with the chemistry of the mountain and we can get radiometric dates from some of the minerals inside of the ash but if you got the impression that we knew the dates of each of the lake layers that's not what we were trying to say there is no there's very there's hardly any organic material in those slack water sediments and so it's it's one of the mysteries that remains involving the Ice Age flood story okay you can't hold it we got to say one more yeah the question is can we say anything about the timing of this we have a lake and then it goes away and here comes another lake how much time is that between one lake in the next hour it depends on which geology you talk to because the dates aren't precise enough yet to figure that out a nice kind of back-of-the-envelope thought is that you have a Lake Lewis for three weeks it drains away we wait fifty to a hundred years we have another lake three weeks it drains away another century in other words that's the time it takes to fill another glacial lake Missoula but if you talk to a Canadian geologist they say that's baloney not all of your floods are coming from Montana some of the floods probably are coming from British Columbia and you can see how this gets out of control in a hurry hey we're moving on and I'm going to open this lid and then I promise to close it again Chris this if you get to a point tonight we're like how long is this thing how many more of these are we gonna watch this is ridiculous in other words if you're bored here's a little game you can play with yourself how many aerial shots are in a particular episode and those that know some of the stuff I've done a long time ago we used to have a dude who got up in an ultra light and would fly this thing and get aerial photo video for us and that's Tom Tabard who's in Spokane and I'm still working with Tom by email but we don't use him anymore because of this this is buddy this is buddy the drone and we don't send anybody we don't send humans up in the air anymore to get the aerial photographs this is the actual drone that Chris uses and when we're out filming on the ground and me talking into the camera that's fine that lasts a little bit my work is done and then we sit in a couple of lawn chairs and opened the cooler and Chris has his controller in his lap and he sends buddy up and he sends buddy this way and that way and then we can't see buddy for a while and then we can see buddy again and see if you can keep track of how many aerial shots especially in this next episode called steamboat rock which was available to us by drone thanks to the state parks department ryan carlson and david McWhorter are with us from state parks and they made these aerial shots available the steamboat rock next in your program well then that's what we're gonna look at steamboat rock in the Grand Coulee let's do it crack the mysteries of the earth discover the energy that drives a planet and builds mountains uncover buried treasure and see what makes mountains blow find out what shapes the top of the earth and explore the secret world below with me Nick on the rocks steamboat rock in Washington's Grand Coulee it looms like a battleship above banks linked and before the construction of Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s like a steamboat grounded by a departed tide silent as an old wreck how did steamboat rock form like most places in eastern Washington steamboat rock is made of dark colored basalt lava rock giant lavas that flowed 16 million years ago but perched high on top of steamboat rock there's a granite boulder that has a story to tell so I got a question for you how do you think this thing got up here water bring it in a glacier it's an erratic fact there's hundreds of these light-colored or attics these boulders on top of Steamboat rock which is 800 feet tall an island of bedrock in the middle of the Grand Coulee we need to study these boulders to tell the story of what happened here during the Ice Age here in northern Washington the Columbia River basalts usually 2 miles thick and dominant is thin because we're at the margin of the Columbia basins lava scene you can actually see the underlying granite bedrock below [Music] now looking up the guts of the Grand Coulee it's not the size that tells you something unusual happened here it's the shape this is a box-shaped Canyon known as a Cooley carved quickly by the Ice Age floods these rare box-shaped valleys like the Grand Coulee have a catastrophic origin 16 thousand years ago there was a dam here in the Columbia River Valley not today's Grand Coulee Dam but an ice sheet the Okanagan lobe of the Canadian ice sheet that positioned itself in this valley stopped the water of the Columbia River and sent it south so when a big Ice Age flood came from Missoula Montana the water was sent south overland to cut the Grand Coulee quickly [Music] after the destructive catastrophic Ice Age flooding steamboat Rock stood 1200 feet tall in fact it was the view from steamboat rock that planted the seeds for what became the Columbia Basin irrigation project as early as 1890 to local dreamers and schemers began promoting a plan to irrigate the deserts of Central Washington with water diverted into the Grand Coulee from behind a dam on the Columbia today banks Lake is Columbia River water that has been pumped south to sit in the floor of Grand Coulee so steamboat rock was created by the aggressive erosional power of the Ice Age floods along with the rest of the Grand Coulee but what about our granite boulder on top of Steamboat the ice sheet itself was right here the glacier dropped these rocks at this elevation and then the ice age floods did their magic carving ice age landmarks here in northern Washington the Grand Coulee and steamboat Rock [Music] okay Eastern Washington you know I'm not picturing this socialite couple in Bainbridge Island you know getting ready for dinner and this comes on then like where the hell is that hillbilly is over there they've got some interesting stuff that's kind of I'm starting to realize the audience for these programs are folks who would not normally pay any attention to geology or are outside of the mountains do I was me stalling for you do you have any questions or comments about the steamboat Rock episode yes sir the music editing the music editing on this is quite spectacular Chris any comment thank you that's another thing to listen for and look for when you watch these how polished the transitions are and when the music is brought in and I've looked at them enough to know when we can I give away some of your secrets the bird stuff comes in that's sometimes not natural is gonna bring in a couple of birds when you when you want to yeah the question is if steamboat rock is 700 feet on all sides how do you get up there it's a couple guys over 50 that are carrying their tripod and their camera there's a couple trails they're kind of steep but you can get up there how many people been top of Steamboat Rock see this is a hardcore group so there's you know a good a good 50 people in here have done that so I recommend it on the south side especially in the case of Chris we loaded up we packed up you got this you got the batteries you got this good good good good about 45 minutes on our way up almost to the top Chris is like oh what did you forget the battery for the camera or the drone for the so Chris went all the way back down got the battery came over a couple more from steamboat rock yes the make and model of the drone Chris this is a phantom 4 by gji DJI and it is a couple years old and there's four battery packs to keep us going in the field and this is what the controller looks like and I've never flown one before so why am I doing this I don't know yes you can get one Bruce has one other who else flies a drone in here anybody else yes sir so amazing stuff that you can capture a couple more from this one Marty Chris would you stand up please I've taken it about a mile and a half away from the controller and what I've lost it no I've never lost it but I did crash it in a ghost forest you'll see that episode but fortunately the grass was about five feet tall and so it didn't hurt the drone and we'd sent it back up and it's a huge forest and what's odd is later on in the day I I crashed it again in the the exact same tree you know so I'll never go I've been with a few other camera people who like flying drones and they're very cautious and their check checking the wind and everything I want to make sure everything's just right and I like Chris these is like let's see what this thing can do you know I'm flying it all over the place and he's getting some stuff that is helpful to us how about one more question from Steamboat yes the the erratic on top of steamboat our light colored rocks to my eye they were mostly Granite's and there's granite bedrock not very far away so I'm not sure we do need to go into British Columbia or Montana especially Montana bedrock that got picked up and moved by the floods are metamorphic rocks and sedimentary rocks and look like Rocky Mountain rocks these are granite like rocks do you have a better answer for that Bruce so not probably not Montana and possibly British Columbia but not that far I'll tell you what we're going to keep it moving what's next the Palouse lusts so we're still in Eastern Washington like you know as you heard Linda say and Linda's been working hard to spread this to other stations we're gonna have people watch these episodes in you know Pocatello Idaho and Southern Oregon and they're hopefully going to be intrigued like where are these places including the beloved Palouse that we all know and love so that's where we're going next the lists of the Palouse hills take it away crack the mysteries of the earth discover the energy that drives a planet and builds mountains uncover buried treasure and see what makes mountains blow find out what shapes the top of the earth and explore the secret world below with me nip on the rocks [Music] the rolling hills of Southeast Washington more than 100 feet of soil make this one of the richest farming regions on the planet but where did this soils come from is it true that the soils are volcanic rich and fertile volcanic soils blown downwind from active cascade volcanoes the answer is no this is windblown silt the soils out here in the Palouse there's hardly any volcanic ash in this stuff this is loose and the minerals in the Loess are light-colored minerals surprisingly the bedrock below the loose basalt has dark colored minerals in it this is unusual because usually soils are the result of parent material the bedrock breaking down but out here in the Palouse the list is soft the salt rings like a bell so where did the list come from the Canada Ice Sheet to the north and mountain glaciers of the Cascades to the west the glacial ice ground bedrock down to kitchen flour the silt got flushed onto planes in front of the ice and then winds blew the loose onto the landscape downwind over two million years the entire span of the ice age the silt piled up to form the Palouse hills a lasting legacy of our glacial past Palouse Falls the official waterfall of Washington State lies on the Palouse River the waterfall is tucked into a Coulee that was carved quickly 15,000 years ago by powerful angry floods it was right here along a major path of the Ice Age floods that all of the loose was swept away in an instant leaving only interconnected canyons that surround the majestic Falls but nearby the undulating green landscape stretches on and on untouched by the destructive floods and the yields keep coming from the fields there's never been a crop failure out here in more than a century loose is the Goldilocks of soils the texture the grain size is just right for storing water [Music] months of snowmelt being stored perfectly in these soils if the hills were made of sand the water would drain too fast if the hills were made of clay the water would pond be too wet so the Goldilocks oils the loose soils the texture is just right for storing water Kevin Polk a geology professor from Walla Walla teaches among the rolling hills of Goldilocks soils he's become an expert consultant for an exciting new industry in eastern Washington well the reason we can grow such great grapes and make such terrific wine is we have a soul that's just ideal for allowing drip irrigation to be managed by the bit of culturalist you know you don't want the the berries to be too big or the clusters to be too fat you want a higher skin to juice ratio so you get more flavors from the grapes you want the sugar content of the grapes and the acid content of grapes to be absolutely in harmony and one way to control that is through the way you manage water water and soil a magic combination ice age lusts setting the table for one of the richest agricultural regions in the world Palouse lusts [Music] okay maybe you like that one a little bit more except felt like that was a little bit more enthusiastic not that I'm paying that much attention very good okay green wine why wouldn't you like it right comments questions concerns yes yes interesting connection the question is our first episode had those chalky white layers deposited by the Ice Age floods in an ice age lake the question is is this the same stuff and the answer is pretty much yes if you're in a place where the ice age floods are carving they're picking up a bunch of the list and then re depositing it down in Lake Lewis when the water stops so that's another way to view the first episode it's this stuff that gets carried and redeposited nice call yes yes done yeah I went we went through a real fast striped hillside was it in the Loess was it the green stuff hmmm yeah see me in my office time we'll talk about that afterwards I'm not can't quite place what you're at what you're asking about sorry do you know what he's talking about Chris okay we'll do it if you're curious about the writing of these episodes I'm a science guy you know so I I write out the script and I have you know stats and things and the process is I then give it to an English major Linda who you heard at the beginning here so she gets the red pen out and says Leigh so there was some interesting turns of phrases there if you were listening to the words and that's all Linda that's all into kind of making this language work with the visuals a couple others from the wine that I know very little by the way Kevin Polk said I don't care what you do but don't call this episode Palouse Hills because because you're in Walla Walla this is not you know the Palouse but what did we end up doing we called it the Palouse hills yes we did not Chris did you film from Steptoe Butte how did you get some of those tell us how you got some of those Palouse scenes the majority of those were shot from Steptoe Butte up above and so just went out there on two different occasions the first time it was really cloudy and and just the weather just wasn't permitting decent shots so I went back out again and then also my son Julian is here and we went out years ago shooting stills in the Palouse and we happen you happen to see a couple of stills in those in the video the last shot was one that I think maybe even Julian picked up no stories that Palouse what you see is basically I was about a half a mile from the drone and and just watching it on the viewfinder and was able to get into the falls it's a huge factor and it's scary because there was one time that we were shooting and it was so windy that I had it full throttle heading toward us and it was actually moving away from us and and the battery is getting low and we were over the Columbia River so there's there's times when it's really dicey but but we've been lucky so far very lucky I give the impression we're sitting in lawn chairs flying this peacefully but here's my impression of Chris while he's flying the drone on windy days oh god I don't see it oh god oh god where is it oh oh oh oh god oh god I died good work do you see it I don't know oh I think it's gone I did oh no there it is and you'd never dream it with the with the hypnotic vistas that you've seen oh my god oh god no where is it one more John was done asking about the the foul the the crop patterns is that what you're asking about no so see me in my office both of you okay we're moving on we're keeping it moving how many we got left three oh my lord well this night ever end hopefully hopefully you're not feeling that so we're moving on what's next deception pass well uh we're on the other side of the Cascades now right we've all been to deception pass how many people been to deception pass state parks guys is it truly the most heavily visited Park among them ah ah okay so Ryan Carlson is giving us the stats there beautiful place challenging place to just keep to five minutes there's a lot going on geologically at Deception Pass here's our attempt crack the mysteries of the earth discover the energy that drives a planet and builds mountains uncover buried treasure and see what makes mountains blow find out what shapes the top of the earth and explore the secret world below with me Nick on the rocks [Music] the bridge at Deception Pass the views are incredible you can see all the way to Mexico but only if you look down at the extraordinary bedrock below the bridge bedrock that formed in a deep ocean then was added to Mexico and then made the long journey to northern Washington where did this stuff kind of looks like ribbon candy doesn't it it's rock up to 160 million years old this stuff is from the deep ocean floor from the age of the dinosaurs these shirt layers are made of silica rich skeletons of tiny single-celled organisms called radiolaria they float for about a month in the ocean before they start sinking like diamonds deep in the earth the silica skeletons faced incredible pressure from the thousands of feet of water overhead as a result the tiny skeletons are transformed into chert bands silica rich rocks that tell a deep ocean story is it possible that these rocks were accreted in mexico and then set north almost 2,000 miles up until pretty recently we we basically had paleomagnetic data there weren't good geologic arguments for where these rocks were and secondly how do you get them up 3,000 kilometers along the coast but but now just in the past several years detrital zircons work where workers from university of calgary and elsewhere have have analyzed samples of the Nanaimo group which is part of the San Juan Islands and found that the detrital zircons very likely were eroded from granitic rocks at the latitude of los angeles the mojave desert and so I think now this has caused a resurrection and interest in the Baja see hypothesis because it is a completely different line of evidence that you could use to argue and support and the evidence comes in all shapes and sizes exotic looking bedrock like this all up and down the west coast of North America granitic mountains with a tropical paleo magnetic signature all the way down to little single grains of zircon minerals that are new kinds of evidence that tell us that rivers long ago in Mexico traveled over bedrock like this it's now clear to many geologists that everything in western Washington that's older than 50 million years ago was part of this Baja BC movement anything younger than 50 million the Cascades the lavas of Eastern Washington the Ice Age floods that's homegrown deep ocean rocks that not only made it to dry land but also got sent packing almost halfway to the North Pole are just another reason to enjoy deception past a time [Music] [Music] okay that's kind of ambitious wouldn't you say you're trying to talk about an idea that 2,000 miles of movement like what does that guy saying like somebody's in the kitchen popping some popcorn huh so I don't know I don't know how well that will go over but what are your thoughts yes hmm why didn't we use an animation to set the stage or to help illustrate this so we got a shoestring budget just a map so that was discussed back and forth a few times so some of this I won't go on forever but some of this is do we focus on landscapes and those of us that love geology and science we want a diagram we want a map we want to basically a living textbook we want to keep going back to the content but again we're starting to realize this is a different kind of an audience so instead of a map which may have helped instead of an animation that may have helped the animations are very expensive and the last episode we're going to look at has a sexy animation but for the most part we don't have enough money to keep paying these guys I thought it would help Kelsey but did not did not make the final cut it's a collaboration yes what do I know back here yeah but yes Bob the answer's no and so that's a potential confusing area as well we're looking specifically at Deception Pass which has this Mexico story but much of the Olympic Peninsula is a different story with a huge Hawaiian like island called Silesia that were formed off the shore of Northern California and they've got added about 51 million years ago so yes some people might take Liberty and just say okay well they got the San Juans behind the guy from the u-dub and they're talking about so there are problems when you when you do little appetizers I think people may be instinctively filling a bunch of gaps on their own which I don't know how you can police that necessarily but yes we're hoping not to talk maybe we need a separate San Juan Island episode that emphasizes that Linda's nodding her head maybe we need a separate Olympic Peninsula show which has been talked about but we can't get the drone into the national park we don't have nice people like State Parks helping us with the national parks if you have a relative who works for Olympic National Park please tell us about him or her so we can figure out how we can fly our drone and hurricane rich anybody out yes how did the rocks get from Mexico to Washington I'll do it in two minutes the San Andreas Fault is a strike-slip fault each time there's an earthquake on the San Andreas the west side of California the west side of the fault lurches north about 20 feet on average and we are mapping strike-slip faults that are much older than the San Andreas that when they were active we're doing the 20 feet to the north every time there was an earthquake and if you have thousands and thousands of earthquakes on hundreds and hundreds of faults you can eventually do that kind of motion and the knowledge we have of the old tectonic plates that used to exist our oceanic plates that we're moving north during this time that we're talking about and so even though it seems like an absolutely our idea and it was considered bizarre 50 years ago as a new momentum behind it because we've got new ways to quantify that so doing it in four minutes is not easy and that wasn't our intent of course but that's the obvious question that's right hey we've got two more according to my math and we're going truly out to the coast of Washington now we're going past Olympia through Aberdeen and Hoquiam which takes forever and finally get through there and we're going to the Green Lantern in at the mouth of a copious River and a place called the ghost forest have you heard about it probably the most famous place for geology in the Pacific Northwest let's look at the episode ghost forest doing a great job back there whoever you are thank you crack the mysteries of the earth discover the energy that drives a planet and builds mountains uncover buried treasure and see what makes mountains blow find out what shapes the top of the earth and explore the secret world below with me nip on the rocks the famous ghost forest at Washington's coast these trees have been dead for more than 300 years and yet many still stand what killed them a 700 mile long fault the Cascadia subduction zone lies 55 miles that way offshore underwater that's not that far away a magnitude 9 earthquake a great earthquake ruptured on that fault and shook the Pacific Northwest coastline from Vancouver Island in Canada clear down to Cape Mendocino in Northern California this great earthquake struck on Friday January 26 1,700 at 9 o'clock at night Native American stories are all we have from that terrible night and yet there are clues out here geologic clues if you know where to dig you like mud you got to come to the ghost forest there's no shortage of mud it's a tidal marsh the tides bring in mud they deposit it in this quiet area it takes a pretty clever geologist I'm not the clever one to dig here and find something that's not mud but in this hole I've gotten down deep enough to find a clean four inch layer of fine grain sand now what is that sand doing here it's a tsunami deposit a series of waves from the great earthquake generating a tsunami and sweeping in here on that winter night in 1700 this is famous tsunami sand because the geologist who discovered it back in the 1980s Brian Atwater traced these deposits through tidal wetlands along a 700 mile stretch of the pacific northwest coast but to find the year of the great earthquake Atwater looked to the ghost forest itself and he needed the help of a dendrochronologist a tree ring expert Seattle scientist David Yamaguchi once we had the ring dates for these trunk samples because we're missing outer wood here we next one after the roots of the same trees and match these rings against the rings of the trunk and these are the most ringed dates turned out to be 1699 which was perfect because in January of 1700 as hitting the 600 miles of Japanese coastline and then the following summer of 1700 the streets were already dead the earthquake killed these trees but it wasn't from the ground shaking it was from the ground suddenly dropping six feet and these trees were killed because their roots of the Western redcedar were plunged into salt water death by salt water poisoning until at water's discovery ghost forests held secrets of the world's largest earthquakes the work of Atwater in Yamaguchi completely rewrote our understanding of earthquake risk here in the Pacific Northwest and eventually the world [Music] comments about the ghost forest what you got yes is it the same event that affected the Makah area the reservation on their on the coast yes it yes there are up we didn't cover it in this episode but we now realize that there are multiple tsunami deposits we were just looking at the most recent but if you dig deep enough or if you have a low enough tide you can see multiple tsunami deposits so we know this happens every five hundred years or so and it's been three hundred and nineteen years since the last one yes thank you the comment is it's good that we a feature David Yamaguchi the guy who did the tree-ring work he was a partner with Brian Atwater Atwater usually is on camera telling the story and so we went with the David Yamaguchi part of it nice fellow as well anybody else about the ghost Forrest yes in the back is a young lady named Christine Christine is waving to you right now so Tris teen has been an invaluable intern with this program hired by cream here Jackson who's also in the back there such esteem so justine has only been with us on one of our location film things and it happened to be that ghost forest deal no she died dug my own hole Bob she didn't dig the hole but we had we had a canoe and a flat-bottomed boat we had a guy from Olympia Rob who we guided us up this river do you I don't even think about this stuff you got to put if you're going on a river that's going to the ocean you got to look at the tides you got to make sure you can get in and get out without tide problems and you know Chris got out of the boat and sunk in to his waist and he had a hard time doing anything with his camera cuz he's like I'm sinking and so he got him back in the in his boat and so Trish Dean was a great help to just negotiate all that mud yes yeah so the so the Congress relief for the guy struggling in the mud is almost as good as a geologist losing his hammer down a crack I agree a couple others before we get to our last episode Ghost forests are are you curious about anything with that specific place or wherever you want to go here yeah not the same time so it's a question about some of you may be aware that in Lake Washington underwater there's an underwater forest and if you're a boater on Lake Washington you know you get you get hung up in those in those submerged trees and it is now clear that those trees were submerged in Lake Washington 900 AD so older than this one during the Seattle fault earthquake so there was a tsunami in Puget Sound but that was just some landsliding happening in Lake Washington so it's a common question if we're dealing with dead trees is it all from one earthquake and the answer is no and in fact the Seattle fault is a shallow crustal earthquake totally different and a lower magnitude than the Coast thing so there's a lot of different kinds of faults and earthquakes and events to keep straight David State Park Ranger from dry Falls so if you didn't hear that david from state park says it is now part of the state park system ghost forest pretty undeveloped it's safe to say you can't walk your family up the river there's no boardwalk or anything but wildin seen it just as we like it hey I think we should do our last episode and and and then wrap it up for tonight we've saved an episode this last one we almost are showing these in the sequence that we filmed them so now we're Labor Day weekend and we're Gorge Amphitheatre and were on the Columbia River below the Gorge Amphitheatre and we got tremendous help from a local couple would you mind standing for a second Gary and Kathryn live in Sun land estates and you know social media is not the greatest for many reasons but it's helpful in this case if you post my post things occasionally filming such-and-such and I think I was whining once I posted something I wish I could get over to West bar to the ripples I've never been able to get over there and this guy's says I get you over there I got a boat I got a house come over we'll have a barbecue all right we'll go over a film a little bit I'll get a buddy again we'll come back well I will cook up some steaks and we'll get a little beer going and we'll make it an evening and that's what we did we didn't film all that but Gary got us across the river from some land estates over to West bar place I had never been before took a boat to go to Kittitas County Kenneth test County they're very far eastern edge of Kittitas County as this giant current ripple show that we'll finish up with here tonight thank you for your attention giant ripples crack the mysteries of the earth discover the energy that drives a planet and builds mountains uncover buried treasure and see what makes mountains blow find out what shapes the top of the earth and explore the secret world below with me nip on the rocks the giant ripples of West bar just upriver from the famous Gorge Amphitheatre what do these ripples in Central Washington tell us about our geologic past even though this is a desert today those ripples behind me were created fourteen thousand years ago when a massive Ice Age flood of water came barreling through this Columbia River Valley [Music] how do we know the date how can we prove that water made those ripples there's evidence out here let's investigate geology is built on the adage the present is the key to the past where do we see ripples in nature today on a beach for sure but also in the desert right this is amazing out here if you ever walked on top of sand dunes before it's a good workout for the legs but if you stop and look carefully at the surface of these dunes there's a beautiful little community of ripples there's wind out here now and the wind is blowing over the surface and creating the ripples each ripple is a quarter of an inch high the ripples are spaced about three inches from crest to crest ten like a big ruffles potato chip the point is without current flowing over the surface these ripples would not exist the current here is wind but ripples also form when the flowing current is water the size and spacing of the ripples are a direct result of the speed and depth of the water when you hike on the giant ripples at West bar you can't even really tell they're ripples because they're so darn big each giant ripple is 40 feet high and a hundred yards from crest to crest instead of fine sand these ripples are made of gravels and boulders even the powerful Ellensburg winds can't move rocks that big you need water and you need a lot of water the dimensions of the giant ripples at West bar point to a powerful force that only could have come from a sudden catastrophic flood of water the Ice Age flood that created the ripples was 400 feet deep and more than 40 miles an hour enough power to shear off the faces of valley walls leaving rare razor-sharp cliffs in its wake so the date how do we figure this out how long has this Boulder been sitting here on West bar there's a new technique involving the surface of the Boulder look at this is a clean surface without lichen on it the geologist comes in breaks off the outer rind of the Boulder sends it to the lab measures parent and daughter isotope created by cosmic ray exposure a surface exposure dating technique fourteen thousand years for this Boulder right here music fans at the gorge amphitheater are drawn to the venue for its unique natural settings all eyes are fixed on the performers on the stage but how many in the crowd can see the drama that played out behind the stage long ago [Music] on behalf of tris teen and creamier and Linda and Chris thanks everybody for coming tonight we'll see you next year how about that thank you much goodbye everybody [Applause]

Channel: Central Washington University

Views: 128,424

Rating: 4.9403834 out of 5

Keywords: geology, Pacific Northwest, Nick Zentner, CWU

Id: BmNjAZ2EAfo

Length: 60min 42sec (3642 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019