My Visit to the Othello Sand Crane Festival
My husband and I attended the 2019 Sandhill Crane Festival in Othello, WA. We went because of my interest in seeing the ice age flood related features, but I also wanted to the the Sandhill Cranes – which we were told accumulate there by the hundreds of thousands. They are large, heron-like birds that like to fuel up in the fields on remnants of corn and alfalfa before heading north for the summer. We were warned to register for events as soon as possible, which we did. Nevertheless, the motels in Othello, a town of 7700, were full, so we stayed in Moses Lake, which is about 15 miles from Othello. The Festival used the high school gymnasium for exhibits and kid’s handicrafts and the classrooms for lectures and presentations. The events are obviously well attended because the parking lots were completely full. My husband was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by the mayor! I enjoyed seeing the familiar faces at the Ice Age Floods Institute exhibit. Our first tour, the evening we arrived, was out to the fields to see the cranes. We had a Fish and Wildlife biologist and an engineer from the Columbia Valley Irrigation Co. Apparently the cranes winter in Central Valley, Calif. and summer in Bristol Bay. They tend to be “right wing” (pun intended). As promised, they were present in the fields in the several thousands. Fortunately, our guides know which fields and sections line roads to take. The cranes make a unique noise, very distinguishable from the honking of geese. There were also hundreds of thousands of snow geese circling like clouds overhead. Unfortunately, the Pothole Lakes were still frozen. The irrigation engineer provided interesting input with regard to the value of the irrigation system, i.e. water provided by the Grand Coulee Dam and a sandy loam soil provided by the ice age floods, The area was obviously rich agriculturally. Our Saturday field trip was with Brent Cunderla, former BLM geologist. He took us through portions of the channeled scab land formations and provided a good overview of the flood story. We listened to his talk prior to the field trip – which provided background on what we were to see. Our Sunday field trip was a hike through the Drumheller channels with Bruce Bjornstad, also a geologist and author of several papers and books on the Ice Age Floods. Drumheller is a state park that includes buttes and cliffs on the columnar basalts. Although I was focused on scab-land geology, the festival had speakers and field trips by many biologists, regional geologists, and and naturalists. If I were to do this again, and I’m tempted, I would attend some of these. All in all, it was a lot of fun. by Lynne Dickman
“Gorge-ous Night Out” in Olympia
For the past four years and more, Gorge people and businesses have provided Oregon and Washington legislators and staff a casual “Gorge-ous Night Out” evening event to remind them and raise their awareness of the Columbia River Gorge. The intent of these matching events in both Salem and Olympia is not to lobby the legislators for anything in particular, but to remind them that we’re here, we’re vibrant, and we’re an economic and cultural force for both states. The IAFI Columbia River Gorge Chapter has been part of most of these events, educating the legislators about the Ice Age Floods story, and citing the economic role that Floods tourism can and does play in both local and state economies. It is somewhat surprising how few of the legislators have even visited some of the spectacular Floods sites throughout the region. So we premiered for them some of the new chapter tourism brochures we plan to release soon, and encouraged them to “get out on the road” for an awe inspiring look at the landscape and people they represent. We even agreed to requests for guided tours of Gorge geology from a couple of legislators and their staff. What better way to entertain and educate them while building a relationship that we can count on when we do need to ask them for their support.
“Hiding in Plain Sight”
Millions of people who visit and pass through the Gorge each year don’t realize the scope of the cataclysmic stories behind the stunning and tranquil beauty they are surrounded by. The Spring 2019 edition of The Gorge Magazine (page 50) attempts to address that premise with a feature article about the geology of the Columbia River Gorge titled “Hiding in Plain Sight“. The author, Gregg Harrington, who is not a geologist, used a private tour with Lloyd DeKay, president of the Columbia River Gorge Chapter, as well as other local geologists as a basis for much of the article. The article touches on 40 million years of Gorge geology, including the Ice Age Floods, and highlights some of the more interesting geological features of this popular tourist destination. Hopefully, articles like this, along with IAFI field trips, lectures and website, will help many recognize and realize some of the tumultuous story that lies behind the enchanting scenery, and make them “never see the Gorge in the same way again”. The magazine is available online and begins at page 50. We had hoped for an Ice Age Floods Institute website mention, but a planned “For more information” section was not included in the article. Still, the article covers a lot of interesting geology of an extremely popular destination, and an article like this is a significant contribution to our efforts to inform and educate the public about the Ice Age Floods.
New – Lower Columbia Chapter Brochure
The Lower Columbia Chapter of IAFI recently produced the third IAFI chapter-specific “Our Cataclysmic Floodscapes” brochure, a guide to several of the key Ice Age Floods sites in the Portland Basin. This multi-panel brochure includes brief descriptions and map locations for five key sites, The Story of the Great Floods, Interesting Flood Facts, information about the Lower Columbia Chapter, and more. Expanded out the brochure measures 18″x23″, but it is folded to a rack card size for distribution to visitor centers. Click here to view a PDF of the brochure, and for more information about where a brochure can be obtained please contact Rick Thompson, President of the Lower Columbia Chapter (Rick@GigaFlood.com).
2018 Annual IAFI Field Trip – Lower Columbia Chapter
We started our field trip at the Tualatin library where the bones of a number of ice age mega-fauna are on display. Yvonne Addington led us through the displays and explained some of her role in arranging to have the bones in Tualatin where they were found. After the library we took a stroll on the Tualatin River Greenway Trail where we were instructed by several members of the Rivers of Life Youth Tourism Corp. who volunteered to be docents on the trail. We viewed signs, erratic boulders, casts of the mega-fauna and granite insets with maps and timelines. This $3.8 million trail was put in a couple years ago as part of Tualatin’s ice age identity as well as the $230,000 bronze statue of a young mastodon and a stylized image of the boy who dug it up only about a mile from where the bronze is today. Most of the actual skeleton of the mastodon is now on display in the library. After viewing the statue we went to the neighboring town of West Linn. At Fields Bridge Park we walked the nature trail with its three kiosks revealing the story of the ice age floods and the Willamette Meteorite that landed not far from there when the iceberg it was carried in was grounded on the hillside. From Fields Bridge Park we traveled east on Willamette Falls Drive over the gravel bar that the town of Willamette was built on. We then stopped at the I-205 overlook to see Willamette Falls. This Falls is the second largest in the United States by volume after Niagara Falls. Since this has been a fairly dry year it was easy to see the basalt rocks that the river cascades over. After lunch at Tualatin Community Park we took a short drive to the Tualatin Heritage Center; home of the Tualatin History Society. It is here where the molar and tusk from the Tualatin mastodon is housed as well as a collection of ice rafted boulders from the surrounding area. Yvonne Addington, former president of the Tualatin Historical Society, described the display of news articles, photographs and book covers telling the story of the Center and the ice age features. Our next stop, the Tualatin Commons, has a man-made lake with undulating hand-railing representing the wave action of the Ice Age floods and glass drinking fountains representing icebergs in those floods along with several ice rafted boulders; one being an argillite. Partly for fun and partly to see how a community can capitalize on an ice age idea we went to Ibach Park with its symbolic ice age floods play structures. The spongy blue pavement represented the water; some of it including ripples with icebergs. In the sand area children can dig for replica fossils and with the water feature they are able to make their own ice age floods through a collection of ice rafted erratics. We viewed the sign that for the last 20 years has been telling people about the ice age floods, the Willamette Meteorite, the mastodon and the local history. This award-winning park and its structures and signage was years ahead of other areas in adopting the ice age floods theme. Click here to view the full article with many more pictures. Between the towns of Tualatin and Sherwood there is a series of ice age flood channels that funneled the water from the Tualatin Valley into the Willamette Valley. This area is called the Tonquin Scablands. We stopped to view an erosional remnant of two basalt flows separated by a soil horizon and Coffee Lake, a kolk lake, created when two flood channels converged and formed a vortex that removed rock and soil leaving what is now a coffee-colored lake. We then drove along the largest of the 14 Tonquin Flood Channels to an area where we could get out and view that channel both north and south.
Ice Age Features in Shallow Waters
Many of the features left behind by the ice age floods are not apparent to the average visitor to areas where the floods were relatively shallow, such as the Bitterroot River valley south of Missoula, Montana. The Bitterroot Valley has erratics and subtle strandlines in several locations. J.T. Pardee, the Montana geologist who in the early 1900’s identified the source of the water for Bretz’s flood, published a paper and sketches specifically about the Bitterroot valley, where he was living at the time. These features can be used to tell the Ice Age Floods story if put together in a useable format. That is just what happened this summer when Jessica Dufresne, a local elementary school librarian, was selected to develop a curriculum aimed at 4th-8th grades under the National Park Service’s Teacher Ranger Teacher program. The program is aimed at linking to lesser known park units such as the Ice Age Floods National Geographic Trail to underserved student populations and offers professionals the opportunity to learn about the resources and educational materials available through the National Park Service. Dufresne, daughter of Glacial Lake Missoula chapter vice president Lynne Dickman, grew up with geology and always found it interesting. Now she can share that enthusiasm with other teachers and young learners. Other partners in the grant were the Montana Natural History Center and the Bitterroot Cultural Heritage trust. The Glacial Lake Missoula chapter also assisted in locating these features and plans to add them to its field trips and its map and guide.
Uncovering a Columbian Mammoth
There’s a Columbian Mammoth hiding out in Coyote Canyon down Kennewick way, and MCBONES Research Center Foundation is working to uncover his/her hiding place. For a small contribution you can tour this hide-and-seek site, or you can volunteer to help uncover the hidden mammoth. Sound interesting? Find out more in this short video produced by Mark Harper of “Smart Shoot“, or visit the MCBONES website. The Mid-Columbia Basin Old Natural Education Sciences (MCBONES) Research Center Foundation provides local K-12 teachers and their students, as well as other volunteers, an opportunity to actively participate in laboratory and field-based research in paleontology, geology, paleoecology, and other natural sciences primarily within the Mid-Columbia Region of southeast Washington State.
The Cerutti Mastodon Site – A Bretz Type Controversy of Our Time
In March, while visiting San Diego, I went to the San Diego Museum of Natural History in Balboa Park and toured the remarkable Cerutti Mastodon Site exhibit. This controversial exhibit of a mastodon site is notable for its claim that the mastodon’s bones were broken by humans 130,000 years ago, making it far older than any other such site in North America. The signs at the beginning of the exhibit read as follows; “The Cerutti Mastodon discovery. A San Diego find reveals the earliest evidence of of human life in North America. In 1992, paleontologists from the San Diego Natural History Museum were surveying a highway construction site to identify and salvage any fossils that might be unearthed. “Field paleontologist Richard Cerutti spotted some bones and tusks. Exploring further, the team discovered that these were bones of a mastodon-an extinct relative of elephants. “But Richard noticed something unusual. The bones were mysteriously broken and the pieces separated. “It took 22 years for scientists to solve the riddle. Once they did, they realized that this local site is evidence of human presence on this continent 130,000 years ago-much earlier than we thought possible. “In 2014, scientists made a new discovery about the age of the Cerutti Mastodon Site. How did this happen? Scientists figured out the age of the mastodon bones using radiometric dating. It’s a way of telling how old a rock or fossil is by measuring its radioactive isotopes. “A radioactive isotope transforms into an isotope of a different element over time. If you know the rate at which the “parent” isotope transforms into its “daughter” isotope, measuring the parent-daughter ratio tells you how old the material is. “Scientists used a method that measures the ratio of the radioactive isotope uranium-234 to its daughter isotope thorium-230. Dramatic improvements in this method have made it a highly accurate means of dating very old materials- up to 500,000 years. In 2014, scientists used this method to date bones at the Cerutti Mastodon Site. “The results were clear. The bones are approximately 130,000 years old.” More than two decades after the Cerutti mastodon’s discovery in southern California in 1993, USGS scientist Dr. James Paces was sent several bones of unknown age. The specimens were important because they came from a site with abundant evidence of processing by ancient humans. Advances in analytical capabilities and the understanding of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil bone provided archaeologists with a radiometric dating tool that, at least in some cases, could confidently and accurately determine ages for these older materials. After analyzing nearly 100 subsamples from multiple specimens, Dr. Paces determined that the mastodon bones—which were still fresh when someone fractured them using hammerstones and rock anvils—were covered with sediments 131,000 years ago, give or take about 9,000 years. This result indicates that some form of archaic humans arrived in the Americas more than 100,000 years earlier than scientists had thought possible. Following the dating of the bones officials at the Natural History Museum began making plans for a permanent exhibit about the discovery. The exhibit opened in 2017. It is very thorough and includes bones, alleged hammerstones, and anvil rocks from the original mastodon site as well as numerous photos and interpretive panels. When J Harlen Bretz first announced in the 1920’s his theory that the scablands of eastern Washington State had been carved out by a cataclysmic flood he met stiff opposition. What he was proposing was so far out of the mainstream of geological thinking of the time that many scientists couldn’t accept it. Schooled in uniformitarianism they believed that earth’s landforms were all created by slow gradual processes operating over time and that an event of the magnitude Bretz was proposing just wasn’t possible. They tried to come up with alternative explanations for the facts Bretz presented that fit in with their current frame of reference. Yale University geologist Richard Foster Flint famously said of certain flood features in the scablands that they presented “a picture of leisurely streams with normal discharge.” The claim by San Diego’s Natural History Museum that the Cerutti site is 130,000 years old is likewise far outside what many scientists of our time are ready to accept. Other similar sites are much younger. For example Sequim’s famous mastodon site is only 13,800 years old. If the San Diego Natural History Museum is correct it totally rewrites the history books about humans in North America. It places humans in North America during a previous interglacial period. It would establish that humans had long since been in North America during the time of the comparatively recent ice-age floods. Critics of the Natural History Museum, and there are many, point to things like what they consider to be a lack of lithics from the site. Others speculate that the signs of bone breakage observed at the site may have been caused by some other creature besides humans or by modern day construction equipment. But the Natural History Museum counters that none of the critics have provided a satisfactory alternative explanation for the evidence that they’ve presented. Cerutti and his team of researchers and the San Diego Natural History Museum remain unequivocal in their conclusion: The Cerutti Mastodon Site is a 130,000 year old archaeological site. – by Mark Sundquist, Puget Lobe Chapter “Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged.” J Harlen Bretz 1928 “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – each aspect requires the strongest scrutiny,” Chris Stringer
6 New ‘Nick On The Rocks’ Episodes
6 new short episodes of ’Nick On The Rocks’ aired on PBS this past winter! Each of these gems are short enough to be taken in by even the busiest of us, and yet have enough information to whet the appetite of even the most intensive of us. Nick is masterful in his presentations and who he draws in to help. Watch them all, you won’t be disappointed. Lake Chelan – Battle of the Ice Sheets (w/ Chris Mattinson) Click HERE to watch. 5 minutes. Chasing Ancient Rivers (w/ Steve Reidel) Click HERE to watch. 5 minutes. Seattle Fault (w/ Sandi Doughton) Click HERE to watch. 5 minutes. Bridge of the Gods Landslide (w/ Jim O’Connor) Click HERE to watch. 5 minutes. Columns of Basalt Lava Click HERE to watch. 5 minutes. Ancient Volcanoes in the Cascades (w/ Daryl Gusey) Click HERE to watch. 5 minutes.
13,000 Year-Old Human Footprints Found on BC Island
Big feet. Little feet. A heel here. A toe there. A digitally enhanced photo of a footprint found at Calvert Island, British Columbia that researchers dated to 13,000 years old. Credit Duncan McLaren Stamped across the shoreline of Calvert Island, British Columbia, are 13,000-year-old human footprints that archaeologists believe to be the earliest found so far in North America. The finding, which was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, adds support to the idea that some ancient humans from Asia ventured into North America by hugging the Pacific coastline, rather than by traveling through the interior. “This provides evidence that people were inhabiting the region at the end of the last ice age,” said Duncan McLaren, an anthropologist at the Hakai Institute and University of Victoria in British Columbia and lead author of the study. “It is possible that the coast was one of the means by which people entered the Americas at that time.” Dr. McLaren and his colleagues stumbled upon the footprints while digging for sediments beneath Calvert Island’s beach sands. Today, the area is covered with thick bogs and dense forests that the team, which included representatives from the Heiltsuk First Nation and Wuikinuxv First Nation, could only access by boat. At the close of the last ice age, from 11,000 to 14,000 years ago, the sea level was six to ten feet lower. The footprints were most likely left in an area that was just above the high tide line. “As this island would only have been accessible by watercraft 13,000 years ago,” Dr. McLaren said, “it implies that the people who left the footprints were seafarers who used boats to get around, gather and hunt for food and live and explore the islands.” They found their first footprint in 2014. While digging about two feet beneath the surface in a 20-square-inch hole, they saw an impression of something foot-shaped in the light brown clay. In 2015 and 2016, they returned and expanded the muddy pit. They discovered several more steps preserved in the sediment. The prints were of different sizes and pointed in different directions. Most were right feet. When the team was finished they had counted 29 in total, possibly belonging to two adults and a child. Each was barefoot. The researchers think that after the people left their footprints on the clay, their impressions were filled in by sand, thick gravel and then another layer of clay, which may have preserved them. Using radiocarbon dating on sediment from the base of some footprint impressions, as well as two pieces of preserved wood found in the first footprint, Dr. McLaren and his team found them to be 13,000 years old. That would make them the oldest preserved human footprints in North America. “It’s not only the footprints themselves that are spectacular and so rare in archaeological context, but also the age of the site,” said Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany who edited the paper for PLOS One but was not involved in the work. “It suggests an early entrance into the Americas.” Dr. Petraglia said the footprints also provided strong evidence for the coastal movement hypothesis and he added that they may have traveled the so-called “Kelp Highway,” a hypothesis that underwater kelp forests supported ecosystems down the North Pacific coast that helped ancient seafaring people hunt, develop and migrate. “The work is important because it shows the ‘real’ people, not just artifacts or skeletal remains,” said Steve Webb, a biological archaeologist at Bond University in Australia. “However, the footprints are limited in number and don’t shed light on activities or movement that tell us very much.” He added that future hunts for footprints should keep in mind that not everyone from this time period walked around barefoot. If anthropologists are too busy searching for soles, toes and arches, they might miss clues from those who wore animal skin shoes. Reprinted from New York Times – Earliest Known Human Footprints in North America Found on Canadian Island By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR, March 28, 2018