Explore the Ice Age Floods with 12 New IAFI Brochures
IAFI has compiled 12 brand-new, full-color brochures into a packaged set to help guide you in visiting spectacular ice-age features across all of our 11 Ice Age Floods chapter areas. With these brochures as your guides you can explore the paths of the Ice Age Floods from Montana through Idaho, central Washington and northern Oregon, and even delve into the many glacial features of northwest Washington. Click on any of the brochure covers below to see a full size printable PDF version (note: you’ll need to scale down to print on 8.5×11 letter size paper). Packets of all 12 full-size brochures are NOW available through the IAFI Store and at participating local outlets. Click a cover to open a PDF of any of the brochures below
Ice Age Floods Playscape in Spokane Riverfront Park
By late summer or early fall of 2020, Riverfront Park will have an interactive playground that will be almost an acre in size. The great ice age floods that shaped the Inland Northwest also are shaping the new playground on the North Bank of Riverfront Park. The playground’s theme is Ice Age Floods, which will allow kids to both play and learn about Spokane’s history at the same time. Designers thought to add this theme since the Ice Age Floods had a significant impact on Spokane’s geology. “That parcel has always felt like an outlier,” says Dell Hatch, a landscape architect and principal in charge of the North Bank project for Bernardo|Wills Architects (BWA), “so it’s really cool to integrate that north side as another element of the park. Kids are going to be able to discover as they play, in the sand areas and as water moves through the playground, They’re going to be learning without even knowing they’re learning.” Soon the space will be home to a wheels park for skateboards, inline skates and scooters, new Hoopfest courts, parking served by improved access off Washington Street, and a new operations building to serve the park’s back-of-house needs. The North Bank will also connect with the soon-to-be-built Sportsplex, located on the basalt bluff above. But the centerpiece will be a 1-acre-plus destination playground themed around the Ice Age Floods that carved out the Spokane River Gorge some 15,000 years ago. “You are going to see some water play features, you’ll see some geology features too, some rocks in different elements the kids can climb around as they learn what the geology of eastern Washington is and why it is so special to our region,” said Fianna Dickson with Spokane Parks and Recreation. Some playground features will help children learn about nature and geology, like a stream that teaches about currents and damming. A climbing wall, rope suspension bridge, large rocks that children can climb, a splash pad, and a 30-foot tall climbing tower with tube slides, would be play elements in the park. “We’re working with Nigel Davies [a geologist from EWU], and we’ve held a workshop with the Ice Age Floods Institute,” says Bill LaRue, a landscape architect with BWA and project manager for the North Bank. “We’re working in like five or six different types of basalt, fossils of local flora and fauna — even a petrified forest.”
Model for a Missoula Flood
ICYMI (in case you missed it) — Floodwaters rise more than 1,000 feet as they slam into the Columbia River Gorge from the east. The torrent blasts through the narrows at 60 mph, carrying truck-size boulders and house-size icebergs. Reaching Portland, water loaded with gravel and dirt roils to a depth of 400 feet, leaving tiny islands at the summits of Mount Tabor and Rocky Butte. Geologists have spent decades piecing together evidence to tell the story of the great Missoula floods that reshaped much of Oregon and Washington between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago. Now scientists have found a way to travel back in time to watch the megafloods unfold, in a virtual bird’s eye view. Their computer simulation displays the likely timing and play-by-play action, starting with the collapse of an ice dam and outpouring of a lake 200 miles across and 2,100 feet deep. The computer model, developed by Roger Denlinger with the U.S. Geological Survey in Vancouver and Colorado-based geophysicist Daniel O’Connell, is filling gaps in scientific explanations of the floods and the baffling landforms they left, including the fabled Channeled Scablands — scars hundreds of miles long cut into the bedrock of eastern Washington and visible from outer space. The simulations also may help settle a lingering scientific controversy about what caused the repeating ice-age catastrophes. “It’s just really powerful visualization that gives a sense of the scale of the floods, how they came down through the channel system and backed up the big tributary valleys,” said Jim O’Connor, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Portland who has written extensively on the Missoula floods. He said the modeling work provides the first “really good information” on the timing of events. During the last ice age, a continent-spanning ice sheet built from massively expanded glaciers descended from the Canadian Rocky Mountains to reach deep into Washington, Idaho and Montana. Glacial Lake Missoula formed behind a miles-long dam of ice across what is now the valley of the Clark Fork and Pend Oreille rivers running from Montana to northeast Washington. The dam formed and collapsed dozens of times over a span of three thousand years. In the simulation of one of the largest possible floods, raging water quickly overwhelms the hills near Spokane and races overland to the south and west. The intense, overland flows carve the miles-long scars of the scablands between Spokane and Pasco, Wash. Thirty-eight hours later, swirling, mud-darkened waters converge at the narrowing of the Columbia at Wallula Gap, where the backed-up flow rises 850 feet above river level (1,150 feet above sea level). An immense volume of water blasts through the narrows at fire-hose velocity. Flow exceeds 1.3 billion gallons per second — a thousand times greater than the Columbia’s average flows today. Lake Missoula’s water, all 550 cubic miles of it, drains in 55 hours — less than three days — according to the model. At that time, the flood surge peaks in the Columbia Gorge at The Dalles, rising 950 feet above river level (1,000 feet above sea level), spilling over the gorge walls in places, and flooding the valleys of tributaries for miles upstream. Inundation of the Willamette Valley peaks on the seventh day after dam burst, in the simulation. Flooding reaches as far south as Eugene. Loaded with mud and gravel, the flood dumps sediment across the entire valley. Repeated floods build a layer 100 feet thick in Woodburn. Such a vast inundation, far greater than anything ever witnessed in historical time, seemed impossible to geologists in the 1920s, when J Harlen Bretz proposed that the scablands resulted from a catastrophic flood, not eons of gradual erosion. The idea didn’t gain mainstream acceptance until the 1960s. Since then, geologists have found evidence that Lake Missoula emptied catastrophically dozens of times during the last ice age. But controversy persists. A few scientists assert that the cataclysmic floods must have had multiple sources, not just an outburst from Lake Missoula. John Shaw of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, for instance, has proposed that an enormous reservoir beneath the ice sheet over much of central British Columbia boosted the flooding. The new simulation suggests that discharge from Lake Missoula alone would have been powerful enough. The simulated flood reaches peak stages all along its route that match the evidence visible today in sediment, with one big exception: At Wallula Gap, water levels in the simulation fell short by as much as 130 feet. “It’s pretty clear, if Lake Missoula is enough to hit all the other high water marks, you don’t need another source of water,” Denlinger said. Calculating the convoluted paths of such a massive flood requires an immense amount of number crunching. Simulating one flood requires more than 8 months of computer time, Denlinger said. But the computer simulation isn’t likely to end the debate. The fact that it can’t reproduce the maximum flooding at Wallula Gap leaves room for doubts. And some experts say there is direct evidence for an additional source of flood waters from beneath the ice sheet that covered the Okanagan Valley. “It is conceivable that other valleys in southern British Columbia contributed water to the scablands but the field evidence necessary to test these possibilities has not been fully documented,” said earth scientist Jerome-Etienne Lesemann at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. “There are a number of unanswered questions,” he said. “That makes the whole Channeled Scablands story a really interesting and intriguing geological puzzle.” Reprinted from The Oregonian, original article by Joe Rojas-Burke, 2010
PacNW Geology Videos – Nick Zentner
Do you want to learn about the fascinating general geology of the Pacific Northwest? Well, perhaps the easiest and one of the most ways to do that is to watch some of the many videos Nick Zentner and his film crews have made and posted on YouTube. Nick has been the host of a dizzying number of short (2 Minute Geology) to long (1+ hour free public lecture) videos covering everything PacNW geologic from 40+ million year old continental accretion to ice-age floods, flood basalts to our awesome volcanoes, huge landslides, and even earthquakes yet to happen. Nick is an award-winning professor of geology at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA. His is an ongoing crusade to bring the drama of Northwest geology to life for everyone – not just academics and die-hard rock hounds. Pacing and narrating with gee-whiz enthusiasm, Nick combines simplicity and scientific rigor, presenting his subject matter in a way that’s stimulating, fun and educational to students and the general public. Here are links to some of his YouTube channels and the topics you’ll find there: Huge Floods Channel – 2-Minute Geology Series – 13 videos including: Geology Video Blooper – Columnar Basalt – 0:54 Columnar Basalt – Geologist explains spectacular stone columns – 2:31 What is a Coulee? 2:36 Erratic Boulders – Rafted in Icebergs by the Ice Age Floods – 2:37 Giant Current Ripples Created by the Ice Age Floods – 2:51 Pillow Basalt (Lavas) and Palagonite. Result of lava flowing into water – 2:52 Columbia River Basalt Group – Related to Cascade Volcanoes? 2:59 The White Bluffs at Hanford Reach – Columbia River Free Flowing Stretch – 3:00 What is a meander – Geologist describes meandering streams, rivers and oxbow lakes – 3:02 Petrified Wood – 15 million-year-old Petrified Tree – 3:31 Seattle Earthquake Fault – Beneath Largest City in the Pacific Northwest 3:42 Wenatchee Washington – Ice Age Floods Geology – 4:34 Palouse Falls and the Palouse River Canyon – Ice Age Floods Features – 5:12 Nick Zentner Channel – Roadside Geology Series – 7 videos including: Frenchman Coulee: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #1 – 10:48 Vantage Erratics: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #2 – 11:55 Yakima River Rocks: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #3 – 10:36 Yakima River Canyon: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #4 – 11:55 Thorp Moraine: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #5 – 8:38 Thorp Lahars: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #6 – 9:37 Dry Falls: Central Rocks – Roadside Geology #7 – 9:50 Nick On The Rocks – 18 videos, including: Seattle Fault – 4:01 Yakima River Canyon – 4:16 Lake Chelan — Battle of the Ice Sheets – 4:24 Puget Sound’s Exotic Terranes – 4:25 Dry Falls – 4:37 Chasing Ancient Rivers – 4:42 Ice Age Mystery of Lake Lewis – 4:42 Bridge of the Gods Landslide – 4:44 Steamboat in the Desert – 4:50 Mt Rainier’s Osceola MudFlow – 4:51 Ghost Forests – 4:54 Ancient Cascades Volcanoes – 5:01 Columns of Basalt Lava – 5:01 Giant Lava Flows – 5:06 Liberty Gold Mines – 5:07 Mount Stuart – From Mexico? – 5:11 Giant Ripples in the Scablands – 5:11 Goldilocks Miracle of the Palouse – 5:20 Downtown Geology Lectures – CWU Geology Series – 14 videos, including: Supercontinents and the Pacific Northwest – 56:33 Ancient Rivers of the Pacific Northwest – 57:17 Liberty Gold and the Yellowstone Hotspot – 58:05 Tsunami In Our Future – 59:09 “Bing Crosby, the Sunset Highway and the Channeled Scablands” – 1:01:24 Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest – 1:02:35 Great Earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest – 1:04:01 Hells Canyon and the Ringold Formation – 1:04:35 Bridge of the Gods Landslide – 1:05:22 Mount Rainier’s Osceola Mudflow – 1:05:52 Lake Chelan Geology – 1:07:18 Exotic Terranes of the Pacific Northwest – 1:09:23 Floods of Lava and Water – 1:10:18 Supervolcanoes in the Pacific Northwest – 1:10:50 Ghost Volcanoes in the Cascades – 1:11:15 Plant Fossils in the Pacific Northwest – 1:13:17 Dating the Ice Age Floods – 1:26:23 TEDxYakimaSalon | Nick Zentner Sharing Geology
Oral/Pictorial Video History of the Palouse Area
This 1/2-hour video begins with the Ice Age Floods impact on the Palouse area, then goes on with a fascinating oral and pictorial history of the area. The video was produced by Mortimore Productions for the Whitman County Library with materials and information provided by a bevy of contributors, including several IAFI members. This is a must view if you’re planning to travel to the Palouse Falls Chapter. In this stunning video you’ll learn about the Floods impact, early settlers, mule trains, sheep herders, and so much more that will make the event ever more personal and relevant. Whitman County Library – Ice Age v06 from Mortimore Productions on Vimeo.
Tualatin Ice Age Foundation Established
A Tualatin, Oregon Ice Age Foundation has been established to provide educational and economic opportunities for area residents, students, businesses and visitors. Local interest in ancient ice-age animals started in the 1970s when a Portland State University college student dug up half of a mastodon skeleton in Tualatin, which now is on display at the Tualatin Library along with several other ancient animal bones from such as mammoths, giant sloth, and bison. In 2018 a Foundation board was created to guide the foundation and raise funds for the center. The board includes Portland State University Geology Professor Emeritus Scott Burns as President; Yvonne Addington, Tualatin Historical Society; Linda Moholt, Executive Director of Tualatin Chamber of Commerce; Paul Hennon, retired Tualatin Parks Director; Jerianne Thompson, Tualatin Librarian; and Rick and Sylvia Thompson of the Ice Age Floods Institute, Lower Columbia chapter. Prior to the Foundation being established, an Ice Age Heritage Tourism Plan, funded by Washington County Visitor’s Association, which contained recommendations for further development by an international consultant, Bill Baker, owner of Total Destination Management. Baker recommended a new Ice Age Interpretive Center to house more of the collections and educate residents and visitors. According to Baker, “the Tualatin area was front and center for one of the greatest natural events of the last ice advance: a series of colossal floods that roared down the Columbia Gorge and pooled in the Tualatin and Willamette Valleys between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago. The entire Tualatin area landscape was shaped by those floods.” Baker saw important economic development, jobs and educational opportunities and recommended a new Tualatin Ice Age Foundation to implement opportunities and raise funds for a Tualatin Ice Age Interpretive Center. Portland State University, the University of Oregon and the Ice Age Floods Institute, Lower Columbia chapter have, for several years, been assisting the Tualatin Historical Society in seeking the prehistory of Tualatin. The National Park Service has identified Tualatin as a key Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail hub. The City has continued their efforts to display their ice age prehistory by the development of the Tualatin River Greeway Trail and Fred Bruning, chief executive for Center Cal shopping centers, donating to the public, a $220,000 bronze statue of the Tualatin Mastodon. To date, many ancient animal bones and huge multi-ton erratics carried here by roaring floods have been found. Private donations of bones continue to be offered as we seek funding for this unusual historical project of building our interpretive center. Tualatin invites you to come see the displays and exhibits we already have at the library, Tualatin Heritage Center, in our parks and walkways and in the future in our Ice Age Interpretitive Center. For more information on Tualatin’s ice age history go to: https://tualatinchamber.com/visitor/ice-age/.
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).