Northern Ice

Bellevue College Building L Room 219 3000 Landerholm Cir SE, Bellevue, WA, United States

(2 Dec 2024)   Grace Sherwood Winer is a geologist and explorer who has done extensive studies on the melting of glacial ice in the Arctic.  She will present present her work on the islands of Svalbard and Iceland at our meeting on 06Jan2025 at 7:00pm at Bellevue College, Building B, Room 104.  Note room change! This will be an In-person lecture and livecast via Zoom. Click on Zoom link:   https://us02web.Zoom.us/j/82985244730 Bellevue College, Bldg B, Rm 104

Richard B. Waitt – The “Debacle Which Swept the Columbia Plateau” 100 years on

Tualatin Heritage Center 8700 SW Sweek Drive, Tualatin, OR, United States

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.

New Interpretations of Old Strandlines

Montana Natural History Center 120 Hickory Street, Missoula, MT

It’s that time of the year! Time to contemplate ice ages and glacial lakes. Time for the Glacial Lake Missoula Chapter of the Ice Age Floods Institute’s Cabin Fever Lecture!  Warm up your curiosity about those iconic strandlines we can see from town with a lecture from renowned geologist James W. Sears. New “LiDAR ” mapping techniques may imply that the famous Lake Missoula strandlines on Mount Sentinel and Mount Jumbo record only one draining of the ice-age lake. The draining coincided with massive erosion at the bottom of the lake, but passive lowering of lake level at the top, marked by short-term strandlines cut a few inches into thin colluvial soil on the mountainsides. About the Instructor: Dr. James W. Sears received his PhD from Queen’s University, Canada, in 1979, and has taught at the University of Montana since 1982. This is a live event that will not be recorded or streamed.

Google Earth & the Field Notes of Bretz & Pardee

North Spokane Library 44 E Hawthorne Rd, Spokane, WA

Join Glenn Cruickshank as he shares a look at 16 years of J Harlen Bretz’s field notes about the historic ice age floods and 30 years of Joseph Pardee’s USGS field notes, now publicly available for the first time in 100 years and visible through Google Earth. This presentation will introduce you to a large and growing collection of historic notes by early ice age floods investigators, but if you can't make the presentation you can explore much of the material on Nick Zentner's CWU webpage. Presentation will be by Glenn Cruickshank, Vice President, Cheney-Spokane Chapter, IAFI, Liberty Lake Presented in partnership with Ice Age Floods Institute (IAFI) (Registration required on SCLD website. Registration opens at 6:00 PM Wednesday, January 15, 2025.)

Terroir and the floods

(12Dec24) Scott Burns is back in March to talk about the impact the Ice Age Floods had on vinticulture in the Pacific Northwset.  Join us as Scott explains how the Floods influenced the regional properties of Northwest soils and ultimately made the Pacific Northwest one of the prime wine producing regions in the United States. The "virtual wine tasting" will happen at our chapter meeting 04Mar2025 at 7:00pm at Bellevue College, Building B ,ROOM 104.  This lecture will be in-person and livecast on Zoom. Click on Zoom link:   https://us02web.Zoom.us/j/82985244730 Bellevue College, Bldg B Rm 104

Mapping the Pacific Northwest’s Glacial Legacy

Cheney Community Library 610 1st St, Cheney, WA

Enhanced LIDAR images (WA-DNR) Glaciers have shaped much of the Pacific Northwest’s landscape over the past 15,000 years. The Cordilleran ice sheet, repeated ice age floods, and expansive alpine glaciation have left their distinctive fingerprints on the topography of our region. Geologists and cartographers have been mapping and interpreting glacial landforms since the late 19th century. In the past decade, the Washington Geological Survey has created new maps that build upon this rich cartographic history by fusing older datasets and techniques with modern insights and technology, such as lidar. Using both historical and modern maps, this presentation by Daniel Coe, Washington Geologic Survey, Seattle, will be a visual journey through the Pacific Northwest’s glacial past and present. Presented in partnership with Ice Age Floods Institute (IAFI) Registration required on SCLD website. Registration opens at 6:30 PM Tuesday, March 18, 2025.)

How the Ice Age Floods Changed the Course of the Palouse River

Moran Prairie Library 6004 S Regal St, Spokane, WA

Palouse Falls - Photo Glenn Traver Before the Ice Age Floods, the Palouse River would have flowed through present day Washtucna, Kahlotus, Connell, Mesa, and Eltopia before entering the Columbia River near the Pasco Airport. Today, it takes a fifty-mile shortcut to the Snake River at Lyons Ferry via the Palouse Canyon and Palouse Falls. In this presentation by Lloyd Stoess, President, Palouse Falls Chapter, IAFI, we look at the two factors that caused this dramatic shift—either one by itself would not have been enough. To examine when this happened, we look at some possibilities and clues recently discovered by scientists. Presented in partnership with Ice Age Floods Institute (IAFI) (Registration required on SCLD website. Registration opens at 6:30 PM Monday, March 31, 2025.)

How Do They Know? Major Findings About the Ice Age Floods

Spokane Valley Library 22 N Herald Rd, A, Spokane Valley, W, WA, United States

  Maps Have you ever been watching a science program and wondered “How do they know that?” Dr. Gary L. Ford, President, IAFI, will briefly discuss the how and who “figured it out” regarding aspects of the Ice Age Floods, looking at five questions. These include: how we know there was a huge glacial lake in western Montana thousands of years ago, how we know it drained rapidly perhaps a hundred times, about how many floods there were and when they occurred, where the floodwater came from, and about how long it took the floodwater to get to the ocean. We also go over which answers to these questions are still being debated by researchers. Presented in partnership with Ice Age Floods Institute (IAFI)