Sharing the Fascinating Ice Age Floods Story Since 1995

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Hiking Drumheller Channels

Hiking Drumheller Channels Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail There are scads of hiking trails all through Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark. On a cloudy day in early June we took off on a couple of exploratory hikes that were simply amazing. We first proceeded south from the parking lot at Lower Goose Lake, running through late Spring wildflowers, eventually looking for one of Bruce Bjornstad’s geocaches. We wandered over hills and down into deeper valleys, always surrounded by the towering walls of basalt defining that section of Drumheller Channels. Along the way we found an area of apparent Kolk depressions with odd spires of basalt poking up out of the middle of a central mound. Soon we passed through a reedy area that bounded the southern edge of Lower Goose Lake. We continued on south to the edge of Black Lake where the geocache was supposed to be, but after 20 minutes with 4 of us looking in the area of the GPS coordinates, we finally decided the cache was no longer there and headed back. The hike was easy, very pleasant, and mercifully cool due to the cloudy morning. We then drove north across the O’Sullivan Dam, and back south through Columbia National Wildlife Refuge to the W. McManamon Road entrance to Crab Creek Marsh Unit #3 and the Basalt Columns at Drumheller Trailhead, the kickoff point to go to the top of “Nick’s Columns”. Nick Zentner’s videos about the columns are great, but the blooper where his rock hammer falls down between columns is priceless. We just had to see those columns for ourselves, and we weren’t disappointed. It’s interesting how only the columns along the edge are free standing, while those inboard are packed around with sediment. The little rain the area gets probably washed the sediment out of the spaces between the bordering columns. After walking around for a while we made our way back to the car and drove to the Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark overlook for a final sweeping viewpoint. The entire area is huge and worth several days of exploring, but it’s also pretty easy to have a great time in just a few hours. This is a place you just have to experience. Quick Facts  Location: Adams County, Washington 99371

Dry Falls Kayaking

Dry Falls Kayaking Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail Most Pacific Northwesterners know how awesomely majestic and stunningly beautiful Dry Falls is, if only from the pictures that seem to show up everywhere. If you haven’t been there in person yet you definitely need to make that trek into central Washington. The drive through the lower Grand Coulee, as awesome as it is, is only the teaser for the view from the Dry Falls Visitor Center. But if you really want to get into the majesty, consider taking a kayak down to Dry Falls Lake or Deep Lake, at the base of those monstrous cataracts.   The dirt road to Dry Falls Lake isn’t for the faint of heart, and a good, high clearance SUV is recommended. But paddling the lake near the base of those 400 foot high cliffs is worth the effort. Bordered by reeds and accompanied by waterfowl, an hour-long paddle around the lake is leisurely, relaxing, and totally absorbing. And who knows, you might end up in someone else’s fantastic photo of Dry Falls from the Visitor Center.   The road to Deep Lake is paved, so it is a much easier place to get to. And the ramp at the lake makes getting in and out pretty easy… just be careful of the slippery algae on the ramp. Once you’re on the lake an hour’s paddle will take you from an area bordered by rolling hills to a section bounded by high vertical walls. Don’t fall out in this area because there’s nowhere to climb out or beach your boat to climb back in. Still, it’s astoundingly interesting to get up close and see the variety of textures in the basalt walls. Of course, you can also do some great hiking in both areas, though climbing the blade takes quite a bit of effort and confidence, but the view is pretty spectacular. Unfortunately, the way back down isn’t any easier than the way up. Choose your route carefully. Quick Facts  Location: Grant County, Washington, United States 99371 MANAGED BY:Washington State ParksWebsite: https://iafi.org/go-do/washington/ Dry Falls is a 3.5-mile-long scalloped precipice with four major alcoves, in central Washington scablands.  A Discover Pass is required for vehicle access to state parks for day use. For more information about the Discover Pass and exemptions, please visit the Discover Pass web page.

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park Interpretive Center Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park is a registered National Natural Landmark, lyng just north of US-90 at exit 136, and west of the Wanapum Lake portion of the Columbia River at Vantage, WA. Established in 1935, it is home to a rare and vast collection of petrified trees. The park covers 7,124 acres, including an interpretive trail, on which visitors can hike and see protected displays of several of the petrified tree species. The abundance of tree species discovered here make it one of the most diverse collections of petrified trees in North America. The trees are thought to have been carried down the flanks of ancient volcanoes from various ecological zones by floods and lahars., and then deposited and buried in an ancient lakebed. Slowly, cell-by-cell, the tree cells were replaced by dissolved minerals in the groundwater, resulting in exact rock replicas of the trees. The park comprises three primary locations. Drive a couple of miles up the Old Vantage Highway to the Ginkgo “Trailside Museum”, constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and recently updated with a new interpretive exhibit. From here, 1.25 miles of the Trees of Stone Interpretive Trail wind past more than 20 petrified logs protected in their original settings with signage about the petrified wood. Birders look for golden eagles, sage thrashers, Say’s phoebes and many other species. Elk and bighorn sheep also frequent this area. A total of 3 miles of hiking trails are at this site. Perched on a cliff face carved out by Ice Age floods, Ginkgo Petrified Forest Interpretive Center overlooks the Wanapum Lake portion of the beautiful Columbia River. The access road is marked by a small sign on Main St. just north of the small town of Vantage. The interpretive center was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression and was later expanded in 1951.The air-conditioned Center museum features a beautiful collection of more than 30 varieties of petrified wood, videos and park volunteers to inform visitors about the history behind this unique and unusual petrified forest. They can also tell about the powerful Ice Age Floods, responsible for the visually captivating surrounding landscape. Outside the Center, visitors can enjoy the day-use/picnic area, view the scenic river, touch petrified wood and learn more about the Ice Age Floods. Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park is also home to the Wanapum Recreation Area about 3 miles south of US-90, which features 27,000 feet of freshwater shoreline and hosts a 50 site, full hook-up campground, a day use area with a swim beach, and a boat launch. Quick Facts  On the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail  Location: 4511 Huntzinger Rd, Vantage, WA 98950 99371 MANAGED BY: Washington State Parks A Discover Pass is required for vehicle access to state parks for day use. For more information about the Discover Pass and exemptions, please visit the Discover Pass web page.

Incredible Glacier Collapse Video

 On Friday,July 8 around 2:45 p.m., British tourist Harry Shimmin reached the highest point in his trek along the Jukku pass in the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan. He separated from the group to take pictures from the edge of a cliff when he heard deep ice cracking behind him. He turned around to an avalanche of glacial ice and snow rushing toward him and within moments found himself in a blizzard. The avalanche was the second glacier collapse of the week, demonstrating the perils of human-caused climate change amid a blistering hot summer in parts of Europe and Asia. These are glacier ice avalanches, rather than primarily snow, in which a glacier broke off and collapsed under the force gravity. The high density of ice added speed and weight to the avalanche. In the Tian Shan event, glaciologist Peter Neff, of the University of Minnesota, pointed out that there was no apparent snow around the mountain so the avalanche was largely a solid chunk of glacial ice. In high mountain regions with permafrost, warm temperatures not only destabilize the glacier ice but also the density of the ice around it. “It’s very dense, more like a landslide than an avalanche,” he said. “The British trekker is indeed, as he is aware, very lucky to be alive in the case of the Kyrgyzstan event,” added glaciologist Jeff Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. “A pretty solid hypothesis is that as temperatures warm [and] climate warms, the amount of melting increases,” Kargel said. “The effects of meltwater on destabilizing ice masses increases, and so the number, the frequency and magnitude of glacier ice avalanches should be increasing … and that does seem qualitatively to be the case.” Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich, agreed. “It is long known that meltwater caused by high temperatures increase the pressure in the glaciers’ subglacial drainage system, which in turn can accelerate glacier motion,” said Farinotti in an email. “This increase in pressure and motion have certainly a role to play in such collapses.” Among the greatest downstream effects from such mountain glacier loss and collapses are on fresh water systems, Neff said. For instance, glaciers in High Mountain Asia play a critical role in funneling freshwater into river basins used for drinking, irrigation and hydropower by nearly 1.5 billion people. From the Washington Post article by Kasha Patel

Frenchman Coulee Drone Video

Bruce Bjornstad is at it again with his awesome Ice Age Floodscapes drone videos, this one from Frenchman Coulee. Watch it below and visit his Ice Age Floodscapes YouTube channel.for many more.

WA Geology Releases Stunning Lidar Images

WA Geology Releases Stunning Lidar Images The Washington Geological Survey (WGS) has released 50 high-resolution lidar-derived images of the State’s geology and geomorphology through the Washington State DNR’s Flickr page. The images are available in 16:9 format (7,200 x 4,050 pixels) and 4:3 format (7,200 x 5,400 pixels). Ten of the images are new (see below) and 40 of them were previously available as screen wallpaper (at a lower resolution). Additionally, WGS has released several full-resolution lidar image series that reveal the State’s geology. These images are great for earth science presentations, learning about lidar, and for using as digital wallpaper. They are also large enough to support large-format printing. Click here for the complete Washington State DNR image galleries Mt Adams Lava Flow Outburst Flood Scars West Bar – Giant Ripple Marks Steptoe Butte – Loess Hills Mima Mounds Previous Next

My Hill

my hill As a city kid in the ‘60s my family occasionally visited my grandparents in the farm country of Washington State’s Waterville plateau. My grandfather and two uncles were wheat farmers near the small town of Withrow, the future site of which had been partly hedged in by the Okanagan lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet many thousands of years ago. Sometimes my father and I would join my uncles on the dusty 15-minute drive “out in the hills” to the sagebrush-surrounded corral, well house and large cement watering trough that served the cattle herd pastured there. Overlooking the corral was a tall hill I would sometimes climb while the trough was refilling. Warned to beware of rattlesnakes, a tiring five- or ten-minute ascent would get me to the top. Astride a large boulder, I would survey the corral far below, the sound of the pump engine distantly laboring. Around me was a panorama of other hills, about whose origins it had never occurred to me to wonder. “My hill” was steep enough that even oblong rocks I tossed down its flank would often bounce and roll clear to the bottom. On occasion, this would elicit salty, muffled hollering from Dad to cease and desist. I’m a half-century older, now, but I wish I had then understood the remarkable history of my hill. How would it have felt at that young age to know that a vast ice sheet had blanketed this terrain some 12,000 years earlier and that the hill I stood on had been its progeny? That, as that glacier began to melt, streams and rivulets had formed on its immense surface? That small sinkholes and other weaknesses in the rotting ice had allowed those waters to sculpt caverns inside the glacier? That those waters carried copious quantities of sediment and rock debris captured as the glacier eroded its way hundreds of miles southward? That my hill, like an embryo within an icy womb, had begun to grow inside one of those expanding interior caverns, ultimately to be deposited on solid ground as a kame, a lasting testament to the retreating glacier? Would I have deduced that the glacier had been at least as thick upon the land as my kame was high above the corral below me? That the erratic boulder on which I sat had been deposited on that kame like a cherry atop a geological sundae? I formed an early affection for the Withrow country because of the many relatives who, not so long ago, had peopled that farmland. It’s strange to contemplate that they are mostly gone from this land now, making it seem somewhat alien to me for their absence. And yet that hill remains, a mute sentinel having witnessed the glacier that birthed it, the quiet passage of the millennia, grandpa’s construction of that watering trough in 1948, and the naive delight of a young city kid climbing its flanks in the 1960s. Dan Jordan – IAFI Wenatchee Erratics Chapter

First People in the Americas – When? How?

First People in the Americas – When? How? When and how did the first people come to the Americas? The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age. But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaska’s Pacific border to enter the continent. A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis. By analyzing boulders and bedrock, a research team led by the University at Buffalo shows that part of a coastal migration route became accessible to humans 17,000 years ago. During this period, ancient glaciers receded, exposing islands of southern Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago to air and sun — and, possibly, to human migration. The timing of these events is key: Recent genetic and archaeological estimates suggest that settlers may have begun traveling deeper into the Americas some 16,000 years ago, soon after the coastal gateway opened up. The research will be published online on May 30 in the journal Science Advances. “People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there,” says lead scientist Jason Briner, PhD, professor of geology in UB’s College of Arts and Sciences. “Our research contributes to the debate about how humans came to the Americas. It’s potentially adding to what we know about our ancestry and how we colonized our planet.”   “Our study provides some of the first geologic evidence that a coastal migration route was available for early humans as they colonized the New World,” says UB geology PhD candidate Alia Lesnek, the study’s first author. “There was a coastal route available, and the appearance of this newly ice-free terrain may have spurred early humans to migrate southward.” The findings do not mean that early settlers definitely traversed Alaska’s southern coast to spread into the Americas: The project examined just one section of the coast, and scientists would need to study multiple locations up and down the coastline to draw firmer conclusions. Still, the work is exciting because it hints that the seafaring theory of migration is viable. The bones of an ancient ringed seal — previously discovered in a nearby cave by other researchers — provide further, tantalizing clues. They hint that the area was capable of supporting human life at the time that early settlers may have been passing through, Briner says. The new study calculates that the seal bones are about 17,000 years old. This indicates that the region was ecologically vibrant soon after the ice retreated, with resources including food becoming available. Co-authors on the research included Briner; Lesnek; Charlotte Lindqvist, PhD, an associate professor of biological sciences at UB and a visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University; James Baichtal of Tongass National Forest; and Timothy Heaton, PhD, of the University of South Dakota. A landscape, touched by ice, that tells a story To conduct their study, the scientists journeyed to four islands within the Alexander Archipelago that lie about 200 miles south/southeast of Juneau. The team traveled by helicopter to reach these remote destinations. As soon as the researchers arrived, Briner knew that the islands had once been covered by ice. “The landscape is glacial,” he says. “The rock surfaces are smooth and scratched from when the ice moved over it, and there are erratic boulders everywhere. When you are a geologist, it hits you in the face. You know it immediately: The glacier was here.” To pinpoint when the ice receded from the region, the team collected bits of rock from the surfaces of boulders and bedrock. Later, the scientists ran tests to figure out how long the samples — and thus the islands as a whole — had been free of ice. The researchers used a method called surface exposure dating. As Lesnek explains, “When land is covered by a glacier, the bedrock in the area is hidden under ice. As soon as the ice disappears, however, the bedrock is exposed to cosmic radiation from space, which causes it to accumulate certain chemicals on their surface. The longer the surface has been exposed, the more of these chemicals you get. By testing for these chemicals, we were able to determine when our rock surfaces were exposed, which tells us when the ice retreated. “We use the same dating method for huge boulders called erratics. These are big rocks that are plucked from the Earth and carried to new locations by glaciers, which actually consist of moving ice. When glaciers melt and disappear from a specific region, they leave these erratics behind, and surface exposure dating can tell us when the ice retreated.” For the region that was studied, this happened roughly 17,000 years ago. The case for a coastal migration route In recent years, evidence has mounted against the conventional thinking that humans populated North America by taking an inland route through Canada. To do so, they would have needed to walk through a narrow, ice-free ribbon of terrain that appeared when two major ice sheets started to separate. But recent research suggests that while this path may have opened up more than 14,000 years ago, it did not develop enough biological diversity to support human life until about 13,000 years ago, Briner says. That clashes with archaeological findings that suggest humans were already living in Chile about 15,000 years ago or more and in Florida 14,500 years ago. https://youtu.be/CmxhFgpIacI The coastal migration theory provides an alternative narrative, and the new study may mark a step toward solving the mystery of how humans came to the Americas. “Where we looked at it, the coastal route was not only open — it opened at just the right time,” Lindqvist says. “The timing coincides almost exactly with the time in human history that the migration into

Waning Pleistocene Ice Sheet

Waning Pleistocene Ice Sheet Affected Megaflood Paths and Local Shorelines Have you ever thought about the how the weight of the ice-age Cordilleran ice sheet might affect the underlying Earth’s crust? There is strong evidence that the crust was depressed hundreds of feet beneath the ice, and since the crust is relatively thin and rigid over a plastic aesthenosphere, that also caused the crust for some distance beyond the ice margins to tilt toward the ice sheet. A new modeling study explored how changes in topography due to the solid Earth’s response to ice sheet loading and unloading might have influenced successive megaflood routes over the Channeled Scablands between 18 and 15.5 thousand years ago. The modeling found that deformation of Earth’s crust may played an important role in directing the erosion of the Channeled Scabland. Results showed that near 18 thousand year old floods could have traversed and eroded parts of two major Channeled Scabland tracts—Telford-Crab Creek and Cheney-Palouse. However, as the ice-age waned and the ice sheet diminished 15.5 thousand years ago, crustal isostatic rebound may have limited megaflood flow into the Cheney–Palouse tract. This tilt dependent difference in flow between tracts was governed by tilting of the landscape, which also affected the filling and overspill of glacial Lake Columbia directly upstream of the tracts. These results highlight one impact of crustal isostatic adjustment on megaflood routes and landscape evolution. Other studies have shown that relative ice-age sea levels were over 300 feet lower worldwide due to the volume of water locked up in ice sheets. Typical depictions of the shoreface extent are generally based on a 300 ft. depth contour, but there is strong evidence that shorelines were up to 200+ ft. higher than present day in marine areas adjacent to ice sheets, again because the crust was depressed by the weight of the ice sheer. A more accurate representation might show a much narrower shoreface in ice-free areas nearer to the ice sheet margin. However, in the Haida Gwaii Strait at the margin of the ice sheet the lower thickness of the ice sheet meant that local shorelines were as much as 550 feet lower than they are today. This was because the much greater thickness of the center of the ice sheet served to push upwards areas at the edge of the continental shelf in a crustal forebulge. It is now widely thought that these emergent ice-free land areas might have provided a viable coastal migration corridor for early peoples making their way to the Americas from Asia during the Pleistocene.