Welcome to IAFI’s “Science Corner”!
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ice in puget valley Q – My daughter and family live west of Dean Kreger Rd, above Silver Lake, west of Eatonville. I tease her that her yard is gravel held together with a little sand. I believe they are...

The origin story of Hells Canyon, North America’s deepest river gorge, has long been unclear to scientists. But new research estimates it formed about 2.1 million years ago when a dramatic flood event likely created a river over the deep...

What are Spokane’s Haystack Basalt Mounds? Q – Throughout the Spokane area there are what some call ‘haystacks’, basalt mounds that look like haystacks. There are many such on Spokane’s south hill and I’m including a photo of one that’s...

New research reveals industrial waste can turn into rock in as little as 35 years, instead of the thousands or millions of years previously assumed. The finding challenges what scientists know about rock formation, revealing an entirely new “anthropoclastic rock...

Rounded Boulders in Spokane Ice Rafted Erratics? Q – I have noticed places around Spokane where there are large accumulations of similarly-size boulders. They are smooth and generally about a meter in diameter.. The type of stone varies, but none...

Analysis of how long erratics have been exposed on ice-free ground in the hypothesized “Late Pleistocene ice-free corridor migration route” suggests that route was not fully open until about 13,800 years ago, and the ice sheets “may have been 1,500...

A newly discovered crater suggests a second impact that would have triggered underwater landslides and tsunamis On its own, the dinosaur-killing asteroid had a staggering impact: Wildfires raged across the continents, tsunamis pummeled coastlines and about three-quarters of Earth’s species...

The mantle hotspot now under Yellowstone is thought to have been the source of the voluminous Columbia River Basalts that erupted from 17 to 6 million years ago as the North American continent passed over the hotspot, and that now...

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...

The date that humans arrived in South America has been pushed back to at least 25,000 years ago, based on an unlikely source: bones from an extinct giant ground sloth that were crafted into pendants by ancient people. The presence...

By measuring radioactive elements in rocks from Earth and other parts of the solar system, scientists can develop a timeline of our planet’s early years. Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old. In that time, it has seen continents form...

Oregon State University archaeologists have uncovered projectile points in Idaho that are thousands of years older than any previously found in the Americas, helping to fill in the history of how early humans crafted and used stone weapons. The 13...