Lower Columbia

Dust in the Cockpit: Volcanic Ash Aviation Hazards - The 50-Year Effort to Mitigate Them
The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption was a watershed moment in our understanding of volcanic eruptions and their hazards. Among the lesser-known events during that summer was the first documented case of in-flight engine damage from volcanic ash on May 25,1980. Two years later, a 747 nearly crashed in Indonesia when it flew into an ash cloud from Galunggung Volcano and lost power to all four engines. A similar event in December, 1989 at Redoubt Volcano, Alaska finally convinced meteorologists, air traffic regulators, and volcanologists that we need a global infrastructure to detect volcanic ash clouds and communicate their trajectory to aviators.

Thes relatively recent understanding of Ancient Mars was partly achieved because of geological studies of the ice age floods that created the Channeled Scablands landscape of eastern Washington. This talk will focus on some of Dr. Baker's personal experiences with the relevant geological investigations and discoveries of the past 55 years.

"Paleontology Panel" - The Willamette Valley Pleistocene Project - The river & landlocked search for Ice Age Fossils with Mike Full & Dave Ellingson, Moderator: Yvonne Saarinen Addington Thursday, September 26, 2024, Presentation 6:30-7:30PM Simultaneous/ZOOM presentation from the Tualatin Public Library, 18878 SW Martinazzi Avenue, Tualatin, OR 97062 Note: We must Depart Tualatin Public Library by 8PM Sharp!!! If you cannot attend in person, join us online. Click here to join zoom meeting Meeting ID: 869 4651 3479 Passcode: 322382 The Willamette Valley, at the time of the Ice Age Floods 18K-15K years ago, was backwater many times for massive floodwaters raging through the Columbia River Gorge to the Pacific Ocean. It became known as Temporary Lake Allison for the Geologist who first studied the Willamette Valley as a lake. The Willamette Valley Pleistocene Project explores the late Pleistocene and early Holocene of the Willamette Valley in Northwest Oregon. Comprised of local volunteers and resources, avocational paleontologists, land owners, and local government working alongside trained professionals and museum staff, the goal is to discover, study and preserve our prehistoric past. Mike, Dave and Yvonne are all members of this project. Every fossil is collected according to scientific standards, documented, stabilized and curated into a database open to the public. The entire collection is destined to stay within the public domain and will ultimately be donated to an appropriate educational institution. Mike Full David Ellingson Mike Full is a retired Police Officer and native Oregonian with a life long fascination of fossils and prehistoric life. Each summer finds him searching rivers in the Willamette Valley for fossils. He is accompanied by friends, students. volunteers and researchers. His fossil collection includes mammoth, mastodon, giant ground sloth, bison, horse, elk, camel, deer, giant beaver & wolf. David Ellingson, a biologist and paleontologist, teaches Paleontology at Woodburn High School. Here he has a dig going many years (25) for megafauna and fauna fossil bones which involves his students in summer months. Yvonne Addington Yvonne Addington is a native Oregonian. She has lived in Tualatin most of her life. In her public service career, she has worked for five Oregon Governors. She is Tualatin's first City Manager and had a role in the formation of the City. She also served for years as Municipal Judge. Her main interest has been preserving the history of the area, particularly fossil bones and erratic rocks of the Ice Age Floods. She's a member of the Tualatin/Willamette Ice Age Foundation. Yvonne is a Board Member of Willamette Falls Heritage Area Coalition representing LCC/ IAFI where she's on the Lower Columbia Chapter Board of Directors. Tualatin Mastodon She rediscovered the bones of the Tualatin Mastodon at Portland State University, which she then gave to the City of Tualatin where they are now on display on the Library's glass wall (see photo). The Mastodon bones were found and originally dug by PSU student John George near the creek South of Tualatin's Fred Meyer store.  

Bill Burgel In a field of geological investigation first identified and then pioneered by J Harlen Bretz, JT Pardee and Vic Baker, Mega-Floods have been recognized throughout the world and on the planet Mars. These catastrophic floods are quite capable of sculpting the landscape wherever they occur with disastrous consequences. Can they happen today? What are some notable historic examples? Is Noah's Flood one of these events? How are they different from Mega-Tsunamis that are also found around the globe? Bill will answer these questions and more at the October 24th meeting of the Lower Columbia Chapter of the Ice Age Institute. Thursday, October 24, 2024, In Person 6:45PM PDT at the Tualatin Heritage Center, 8700 SW Sweek Drive, Tualatin, OR 97062 ALSO Simultaneous Live ZOOM from THC if you cannot attend the THC meeting in-person. Click for Zoom meeting, Meeting ID: 869 4651 3479 Passcode: 322382. For more information contact: LowerColumbia@iafi.org

J Harlan Bretz "It was a debacle," wrote J Harlan Bretz in 1923, that carved Washington's Channeled Scabland. This prescient finale today brings to mind debacles geologic, personal and periodic. The cataclysm in Bretz's "Spokane flood" initiated a famous controversy. Published arguments against great Scabland flood erupted in the 1920's and raged on into the 1940's--critics by various more conventional schemes calling for less water over more time. As Bretz had almost no published support, it seemed to many his personal debacle. Yet re-reading the early reports, and recently the summary field notes, I sense that by the extraordinary field evidence he had documented throughout the region, Bretz knew all along that his 'catastrophysm' would prevail. After J.T. Pardee showed in 1942 that huge glacial Lake Missoula had discharged abruptly. Bretz and colleagues in 1956 show with the old evidence--and with stark new evidence in giant current dunes adorning many gravel bars--that water from glacial Lake Missoula had indeed carved the 'Channelled Scabland'. With detailed geomorphic field evidence they skewer Bretz's critics--this in turn becoming their personal debacle. waittThe story takes a more gradualistic turn with discovery that Lake Missoula drained periodically. In his final Scablands paper in 1969, Bretz, by geomorphic evidence counts seven floods at most. But hardly a decade later, new stratigraphic evidence was showing that Lake Missoula released scores of giant floods during the last glaciation alone. These outbursts were both periodic and gigantic by degrees, truly colossal and coming decades apart when the damming Purcell Trench lobe was thick, but as the ice gradually thinned diminishing to coming only a decade or a few years apart, and at the end one year apart. This 'jokulhlaups' idea erupted new controversy, this one also lasting more than two decades. If it has simmered down lately, this argument is also being settled by field evidence. If Missoula floods were numerous and periodic during last-glacial marine-Isotope stage 2 (25-15 thousand years ago), what happened during seemingly equally deep glaciations of AR-isotope stages such as 6 and 12 (140-440 thousand years ago)? So far we know of no supporting field evidence--only scattered field sites that suggest one gigantic flood far back, perhaps a million years ago. It will be for today's young scientists to decipher this and other remaining enigmas. Thursday, January 16, 2025, In Person 6:45PM PST Tualatin Heritage Center, 8700 SW Sweek Drive, Tualatin, OR 97062 ALSO Simultaneous Live ZOOM from THC if you cannot attend the in-person THC meeting yourself. Click here for Zoom meeting, Meeting ID: 869 4651 3479 Passcode: 322382.

The 1980 Eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington was the worst volcanic disaster in recorded US history. Geologist Sheila Alfsen, will bring the event back to life; detailing its onset and eruption sequence. She will illustrate its volcanic hazards with examples from other volcanoes and comparing their relative sizes. Sheila will discuss the advances in volcanology made as result of the eruption, and how they are used around the world to gain prediction and offer disaster mitigation. Thursday, May 15, 2025, In Person 7:00 PM (PDT) at Tualatin Heritage Center, 8700 SW Sweek Drive, Tualatin, OR 97062 ALSO Live ZOOM from THC, Click for Zoom meeting, Meeting ID: 869 4651 3479 Passcode: 322382. Sheila Alfsen Sheila Alfsen's Background: *Current Instructor of Geology: Portland State University, Chemeketa Community College, Linn Benton Community College *Researcher *FEMA Earthquake Publication Reviewer *Paleontology- University of Oregon, Volcanology, Oceanography *Master of Arts in Teaching, Western Oregon University *Bachelors of Arts from Western Oregon University, Geology and Spanish *Oregon resident since 1970 - extensively traveled in US, particularly the Western states, Alaska, Arctic region, Iceland, Hawaii, Mexico, Puerto Rico * Thirty-five years in Education: Experience in interpretation for National Park Service