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height of dry falls Q – I am a long time resident and have been to Dry Falls several times. Can you please tell me the elevation change between the top of the falls to the lake below ? Do you know or can you direct me to the information? Thank You! A – The height is often cited as 400′ but it appears to be a bit over 500′ based on USGS topographic maps.
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 of human-modified sloth bones in association with stone tools from geological layers that date to 25,000 to 27,000 years ago is strong evidence that people arrived in South America far earlier than previously assumed. Discovered in the Santa Elina rock shelter in central Brazil, three sloth osteoderms — bony deposits that form a kind of protective armor over the skin of animals such as armadillos — found near stone tools sported tiny holes that only humans could have made. The finding is among the earliest evidence for humans in the Americas, according to a paper published July 12 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The Santa Elina rock shelter, located in the Mato Grosso state in central Brazil, has been studied by archaeologists since 1985. Previous research at the site noted the presence of more than 1,000 individual figures and signs drawn on the walls, hundreds of stone tool artifacts, and thousands of sloth osteoderms, with three of the osteoderms showing evidence of human-created drill holes. The newly published study documents these sloth osteoderms in exquisite detail to show that it is extremely unlikely that the holes in the bones were made naturally, with the implication that these bones push back the date humans settled in Brazil to 25,000 to 27,000 years ago. These dates are significant because of the growing — but still controversial — evidence for very early human occupation in South America, such as a date of 22,000 years ago for the Toca da Tira Peia rock shelter in eastern Brazil. Using a combination of microscopic and macroscopic visualization techniques, the team discovered that the osteoderms, and even their tiny holes, had been polished, and noted traces of stone tool incisions and scraping marks on the artifacts. Animal-made bite marks on all three osteoderms led them to exclude rodents as the creators of the holes. “These observations show that these three osteoderms were modified by humans into artefacts, probably personal ornaments,” the researchers wrote in their paper. Edited from Live Science article by Kristina Killgrove
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 are Columbia Basin basalt. I assume these are ice-rafted erratics. My question is how did so many end up in a few locations and why are they all similarly sized? My guess is that the flood waters ran into a slope and became still enough to drop similarly-sized loads. Is that right? Or is there another explanation? The South Hill Park and Ride has 81 scattered around the site, some of which I assume were pushed out of the way for paving. Another site nearby has perhaps 40 used for a retaining wall. The Spokane Valley YMCA has a lot, as does the parking lot for the Dishman Hills Natural Area. There are also places along Trent Avenue where these stones are found. Thanks for your reply. – James VanderMeer A – Most all of the well-rounded boulders that clutter parts of the floor of the Spokane Valley are, indeed, derived from the Ice Age floods, but are probably were not ice-rafted to their present locations. They were moved by the tremendous power just downstream from the initial Ice Dam failure, rolled or bounced along the bottom of Glacial Lake Columbia and accumulated rapidly in the deeper parts of the lake. The power of the flood currents dissipated as the waters moved west. Most of the large boulders found father west were probably ice-rafted. The source for these boulders was most likely glacial moraine and stream sediments from Idaho, Montana, and Canada, thus no local basalt in the mix. Because they were “current” derived, they are often sorted in size, and derive from a source where there has been much erosion already and well rounded. More information on this can be had in the online Zoom lecture “What Happened When the Dam Burst” by the IAFI on November 24 by Michael Hamilton.
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 underlie much of the path of the Ice Age Floods. During and since that time the hotspot cut a long and explosive path from the Oregon/Nevada/California border across the Snake River Plain, but ongoing research appears to show it to be fairly stable for at least our brief geologic time. A new study has found the amount of melted rock beneath Yellowstone’s supervolcano is far higher than previous estimates. Scientists have worked out the consistency of the magma under the Yellowstone caldera using seismic waves — and the reservoir is filled with “mush” that doesn’t pose an imminent eruption threat. While researchers say there is no sign of an imminent eruption, the discovery provides a more detailed view of what’s going on in the enormous magma chamber that sits beneath the national park. Far from a smooth blend of molten rock, magma reservoirs contain a large amount of solid rock, semi-liquid crystals, gasses and other volatile substances. This “magmatic mush” is highly dynamic but tends to burst out from deep underground when the proportion of liquid — or melt — crosses a certain threshold. Previous work suggests that eruptions typically occur when at least 50% of the space in the upper magma reservoir — a layer of flattened pockets of magma stacked on top of each other — is filled with melt. The magma reservoir beneath Yellowstone volcano consists of two chambers — a shallow reservoir near the surface that’s around 55 miles (90 kilometers) long and 25 miles (40 km) wide, and a deeper chamber that is about 4.5 times larger. While the deeper reservoir contains about 2% melt, the upper chamber contains far more: A study published in Science in December 2022 put the proportion of melt between 16% and 20%. Now, Sin-Mei Wu, a geophysicist and postdoctoral researcher with the Swiss Seismological Service at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and colleagues have found the percentage is much higher. The team used seismic wave data to assess the texture and composition of the upper magma reservoir, which is about 3 miles (5 km) deep at Yellowstone. The results, published June 8 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, indicate the upper chamber consists of 28% melt — 8% to 12% more than the 2022 estimate, which was found with different methods, Wu said. “What we found is that the portion of liquid phase is not enough to have an imminent eruption,” Wu told Live Science. “Although we found a much higher portion of liquid than what was previously found, it’s still only up to 28%. So, to the best of our knowledge, Yellowstone will not have an imminent eruption.” Working out the proportion of liquid in magma reservoirs could help scientists evaluate the risk of volcanic eruptions elsewhere. “It’s important to understand the eruption potential, maybe not for Yellowstone so far, but you can apply the same methods to other magma systems that are more prone to eruption and to some that are already erupting,” Wu said. The methodology used for the study is “revolutionary in the detail and resolution it allowed for,” said Michael Poland, a research geophysicist and scientist-in-charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. The magma at Yellowstone and in other magmatic systems is like “mush,” Poland told Live Science in an email. “We often refer to ‘magmatic mush’ to convey a sense that it’s not a 100% molten ball, but also contains a lot of solid material — in the case of Yellowstone, way more solid than liquid material,” he added. “Maybe like a really thick lentil soup.” Despite recent breakthroughs, scientists can’t be sure what exactly lurks beneath the supervolcano, Wu said. “We are looking forward to some joint interpretation with other geophysical data to find out, for example, if we only have melt or if there is gas, volatiles, or something else that will help us understand the eruption dynamics.” From an article in Live Science by Sascha Pare
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 and disappear, ice caps expand and retreat, and life evolve from single-celled organisms into blue whales. But how do we know Earth’s age? We start by looking inside it. “When you’re an Earth scientist who looks at a rock, it’s not just a rock; it’s like that rock has a story that you can try to decipher,” said Becky Flowers, a geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. When minerals form out of magma or lava, they often contain traces of radioactive material, such as uranium. Over time, those radioactive elements decay, meaning they spew radiation, eventually transforming them into new, more stable elements that remain trapped inside the mineral. Take radioactive uranium-238, a common form of uranium. Its atoms will release energy until they eventually turn into lead. That process occurs at a fixed rate known as a half-life, which corresponds to the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms to decay. The half-life of uranium-238 is more than 4 billion years, meaning it takes more than 4 billion years for half of the uranium-238 in a sample to become lead. This makes it perfect for dating objects that are very, very old. By knowing these half-lives, we can calculate how old a rock is based on the ratio of the “parent” radioactive element and the “daughter” stable element — a method called radiometric dating. The mineral zircon is commonly used for radiometric dating because it contains a relatively large amount of uranium, Flowers said. Uranium-lead dating is just one type of radiometric dating. Other types use different elements; for example, radiocarbon dating, one of the most common methods, uses a radioactive isotope of carbon that has a half-life of thousands of years and is useful for dating organic matter. Using these methods, geologists have found minerals on Earth that date as far back as 4.4 billion years, meaning the planet has been around at least that long. But if scientists say Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old, where did those extra 100 million years or so come from? Earth, as mentioned, has changed a lot over billions of years, especially through processes such as plate tectonics, which shift the crust, birthing new land out of magma and subducting old land back underground. As a result, rocks from the very beginning of the planet’s history are hard to find; they’ve long since eroded or melted back into raw material. But scientists can use radiometric dating to determine the age of rocks from other parts of the solar system, too. Some meteorites contain materials that are more than 4.56 billion years old, and rocks from the moon and Mars have also been dated to around 4.5 billion years ago. Those dates are pretty close to the time scientists think the solar system started to take shape out of the cloud of gas and dust surrounding the newborn sun. And by knowing all of these relative ages, we can start to piece together a timeline of how Earth, the moon, Mars and all of the other little rocks floating around in nearby space started to form. Yet the transition from primordial dust cloud to planet Earth didn’t happen all at once but rather over millions of years, Rebecca Fischer, an Earth and planetary scientist at Harvard University, told Live Science. That means our understanding of Earth’s age will always be less about a specific year when the planet formed and more about a general sense of the era when our home planet started to take shape. By Ethan Freedman (lifes-little-mysteries ) reprinted from LiveScience.com
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 full and fragmentary projectile points, razor sharp and ranging from about half an inch to 2 inches long, are from roughly 15,700 years ago, according to carbon-14 dating. That’s about 3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points found throughout North America, and 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in present-day Idaho. “From a scientific point of view, these discoveries add very important details about what the archaeologic al record of the earliest peoples of the Americas looks like,” said Loren Davis, an anthropology professor at OSU and head of the group that found the points. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We think that people were here in the Americas 16,000 years ago;’ it’s another thing to measure it by finding well-made artifacts they left behind.” Previously, Davis and other researchers working the Cooper’s Ferry site had found simple flakes and pieces of bone that indicated human presence about 16,000 years ago. But the discovery of projectile points reveals new insights into the way the first Americans expressed complex thoughts through technology at that time, Davis said. The Salmon River site where the points were found is on traditional Nez Perce land, known to the tribe as the ancient village of Nipéhe. The land is currently held in public ownership by the federal Bureau of Land Management. The points are revelatory not just in their age, but in their similarity to projectile points found in Hokkaido, Japan, dating to 16,000-20,000 years ago, Davis said. Their presence in Idaho adds more detail to the hypothesis that there are early genetic and cultural connections between the ice age peoples of Northeast Asia and North America. “The earliest peoples of North America possessed cultural knowledge that they used to survive and thrive over time. Some of this knowledge can be seen in the way people made stone tools, such as the projectile points found at the Cooper’s Ferry site,” Davis said. “By comparing these points with other sites of the same age and older, we can infer the spatial extents of social networks where this technological knowledge was shared between peoples.” These slender projectile points are characterized by two distinct ends, one sharpened and one stemmed, as well as a symmetrical beveled shape if looked at head-on. They were likely attached to darts, rather than arrows or spears, and despite the small size, they were deadly weapons, Davis said. “There’s an assumption that early projectile points had to be big to kill large game; however, smaller projectile points mounted on darts will penetrate deeply and cause tremendous internal damage,” he said. “You can hunt any animal we know about with weapons like these.” These discoveries add to the emerging picture of early human life in the Pacific Northwest, Davis said. “Finding a site where people made pits and stored complete and broken projectile points nearly 16,000 years ago gives us valuable details about the lives of our region’s earliest inhabitants.” The newly discovered pits are part of the larger Cooper’s Ferry record, where Davis and colleagues have previously reported a 14,200-year-old fire pit and a food-processing area containing the remains of an extinct horse. All told, they found and mapped more than 65,000 items, recording their locations to the millimeter for precise documentation. The projectile points were uncovered over multiple summers between 2012 and 2017, with work supported by a funding partnership held between OSU and the BLM. All excavation work has been completed and the site is now covered. The BLM installed interpretive panels and a kiosk at the site to describe the work. Davis has been studying the Cooper’s Ferry site since the 1990s when he was an archaeologist with the BLM. Now, he partners with the BLM to bring undergraduate and graduate students from OSU to work the site in the summer. The team also works closely with the Nez Perce tribe to provide field opportunities for tribal youth and to communicate all findings. The findings were published in the journal Science Advances. Reprinted from Oregon State University Newsroom, STORY BY: Molly Rosbach, SOURCE: Loren Davis
THE GRAND COULEE – A Floods Poem THE GRAND COULEE Older than legends,Younger than mountains,The earth remembersThe Great Inland Sea. And that Sea emptiedIn torrential furyNever imaginedEven in dreams. Down through the canyons,Flood of all riversCarving the couleesTime, time again. Roiled surging waters,Thunder of thunders,Swift toward the oceanReshaping the plain. Gone with the glaciersIs the great Lake Missoula,Gone from remembrance,Like mist in the wind. Yet the story is etchedIn the canyons and couleesLeft for those who imagineTo seek and to find. David Wahl January 4, 2002 Lower Grand Coulee Upper Grand Coulee at Steamboat Rock (left)
Long before dinosaurs, Earth was dominated by animals that were in many ways even more incredible. Carnivores such as Titanophoneus, or “titanic murderer,” stalked enormous armored reptiles the size of buffalo. Many of these animals died out in a mass extinction during the Capitanian Age approximately 260 million years ago. Now an international team of researchers says evidence suggests this mass extinction was not a single event but two, separated by nearly 3 million years. Both were caused by the same culprit: massive volcanic eruptions. By studying uranium isotope profiles of marine samples collected in the South China Sea, scientists identified two “pulses” in which the oceans became deprived of life-giving oxygen. In a study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers say their analysis provides evidence that the oxygen-deprived oceans precipitated two mass extinctions around 259 million and 262 million years ago during the Middle Permian Period. Looming climate disaster By studying these ancient extinctions, researchers can better predict how modern-day global warming could affect the ocean’s food chain. “We are studying the biocrisis in the Permian Period, but similar warming is happening today because of human events,” said Thomas Algeo, a study co-author and University of Cincinnati professor of geosciences. “Humans are mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions as a consequence of the release of carbon into the atmosphere.” The study was led by researcher Huyue Song at the China University of Geosciences, a former postdoctoral researcher at UC. “Today, we are facing several global change issues, including global warming, ocean hypoxia, seawater acidification and biodiversity decline, which are similar to the environmental changes during the Middle Permian biological crisis interval,” Song said. Scientists have identified the five biggest mass extinctions, including the most cataclysmic of all 252 million years ago called “the great dying” that wiped out 90% of ocean life and 70% of land animals. This disaster, too, was caused by massive volcanic activity that turned the seas into dead zones, said Algeo. “The Capitanian extinctions are not among the Big Five, but they are significant,” Algeo said. How do volcanic eruptions lead to extinctions? Algeo said massive eruptions create a brief period of cooling from ash in the upper atmosphere reflecting sunlight, followed by much longer periods of global warming. The release of massive volumes of greenhouse gases warmed the oceans. The warm surface water did not allow dissolved oxygen to reach lower depths, eventually destroying the food chain. “The ocean is teetering on the edge of anoxia,” he said of this absence of oxygen. “Dissolved oxygen has to be taken up by the surface layer and supplied to the deep ocean. But warmer water is lower density. When you increase the density differential, you prevent any overturn and there’s no way to get dissolved oxygen into the deeper layers.” One way researchers identify these massive volcanic eruptions is by looking for mercury in the sedimentary layers. “Mercury has been shown to be a useful proxy for volcanic eruptions,” Algeo said. “Large volcanic eruptions spew mercury into the atmosphere that gets carried around Earth and deposited in marine sediments.” Scientists say the volcanic eruptions that caused the great dying originated in Siberia. The eruptions that caused the twin mass extinctions in the Permian took place in southwest China in a place known as the Emeishan Large Igneous Province. Algeo said he would like to see if any terrestrial evidence supports the conclusions derived from their study of ancient oceans. He is optimistic that geology will unlock more mysteries about prehistoric life on Earth. “Over the last 40 years we’ve made tremendous strides in understanding the Earth’s past,” Algeo said. “It’s partly because we have all these new tools we can apply. And we have many more people working in this field than we had a generation ago.” Researcher Song said the dual disasters in the Permian show the devastating effects that global warming can have. “We must pay attention to these environmental issues and prevent the sixth mass extinction,” he said. Reprinted from Phys.org, article by Michael Miller, University of Cincinnati
It’s difficult for most people to grasp the immensity of time as it’s viewed by archeologists, much less as it’s viewed by geologist or cosmologists. One way often used by those scientists to model time in terms that others can visualize is to compare time to distance along a path, with markers to denote specific events and periods. To Scale: TIME is a YouTube video about a group of friends who built a practical scale model of time: 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, and our place within it, on a dry lakebed in the Mojave.
Badger Mountain Landslide Potential? Q – With all the homes being built on and around Badger mountain in the Tri-Cities, is there any danger of landslides, similar to what is happening at Rattlesnake Hills? I’m unfamiliar with the geology there, and I understand that building homes can affect stability, but are there other likely dangers in that area that potential homebuyers/builders should be wary of? A – There have been prehistoric landslides (now stabilized) on Badger Mountain along with the other ridges nearby. These may have occurred following one more of the Ice Age floods >15k years ago. Renewed landsliding is unlikely as long as there is no significant addition of water that could load the slope and/or lubricate weak zones within, or between, basalt flows – leading to instability. Badger Mountain itself is probably safe since there has been little new development on top or on the steeper sides of the mountain. Most of the mountain is now free from future development, thanks to the Friends of Badge Mountain, who have turned most of the mountain into a preserve. (One exception is the group of new Sterling homes built at the west end of the ridge). Other unprotected ridges may not be as lucky. The cluster of new homes built on top of and along the sides of Little (East) Badger Mountain could generate stability problems, especially if excess water used for landscaping is allowed to percolate underground. There are also a number of new roads dug into the steeper north side of the ridge that potentially could undermine and destabilize the slopes above. Adding irrigation water to these slopes will only increase the likelihood of slope failure in the future. – Bruce Bjornstad
“To see a world in a grain of sand”, the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do. We observe the composition of mineral grains, smaller than the width of a human hair. Then, we extrapolate the chemical processes they suggest to ponder the construction of our planet itself. Now, we’ve taken that minute attention to new heights, connecting tiny grains to Earth’s place in the galactic environment. Looking out to the universe At an even larger scale, astrophysicists seek to understand the universe and our place in it. They use laws of physics to develop models that describe the orbits of astronomical objects. Although we may think of the planet’s surface as something shaped by processes entirely within Earth itself, our planet has undoubtedly felt the effects of its cosmic environment. This includes periodic changes in Earth’s orbit, variations in the Sun’s output, gamma ray bursts, and of course meteorite impacts. Just looking at the Moon and its pockmarked surface should remind us of that, given Earth is more than 80 times more massive than its gray satellite. In fact, recent work has pointed to the importance of meteorite impacts in the production of continental crust on Earth, helping to form buoyant “seeds” that floated on the outermost layer of our planet in its youth. We and our international team of colleagues have now identified a rhythm in the production of this early continental crust, and the tempo points to a truly grand driving mechanism. This work has just been published in the journal Geology. The rhythm of crust production on Earth Many rocks on Earth form from molten or semi-molten magma. This magma is derived either directly from the mantle – the predominantly solid but slowly flowing layer below the planet’s crust – or from recooking even older bits of pre-existing crust. As liquid magma cools, it eventually freezes into solid rock. Through this cooling process of magma crystallization, mineral grains grow and can trap elements such as uranium that decay over time and produce a sort of stopwatch, recording their age. Not only that, but crystals can also trap other elements that track the composition of their parental magma, like how a surname might track a person’s family. With these two pieces of information – age and composition – we can then reconstruct a timeline of crust production. Then, we can decode its main frequencies, using the mathematical wizardry of the Fourier transform. This tool basically decodes the frequency of events, much like unscrambling ingredients that have gone into the blender for a cake. Our results from this approach suggest an approximate 200-million-year rhythm to crust production on the early Earth. Our place in the cosmos But there is another process with a similar rhythm. Our Solar System and the four spiral arms of the Milky Way are both spinning around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, yet they are moving at different speeds. The spiral arms orbit at 210 kilometers per second, while the Sun is speeding along at 240km per second, meaning our Solar System is surfing into and out of the galaxy’s arms. You can think of the spiral arms as dense regions that slow the passage of stars much like a traffic jam, which only clears further down the road (or through the arm). This model results in approximately 200 million years between each entry our Solar System makes into a spiral arm of the galaxy. So, there seems to be a possible connection between the timing of crust production on Earth and the length of time it takes to orbit the galactic spiral arms – but why? Strikes from the cloud In the distant reaches of our Solar System, a cloud of icy rocky debris named the Oort cloud is thought to orbit our Sun. As the Solar System periodically moves into a spiral arm, interaction between it and the Oort cloud is proposed to dislodge material from the cloud, sending it closer to the inner Solar System. Some of this material may even strike Earth. Earth experiences relatively frequent impacts from the rocky bodies of the asteroid belt, which on average arrive at speeds of 15km per second. But comets ejected from the Oort cloud arrive much faster, on average 52km per second. We argue it is these periodic high-energy impacts that are tracked by the record of crust production preserved in tiny mineral grains. Comet impacts excavate huge volumes of Earth’s surface, leading to decompression melting of the mantle, not too dissimilar from popping a cork on a bottle of fizz. This molten rock, enriched in light elements such as silicon, aluminum, sodium, and potassium, effectively floats on the denser mantle. While there are many other ways to generate continental crust, it’s likely that impacting on our early planet formed buoyant seeds of crust. Magma produced from later geological processes would adhere to those early seeds. Harbingers of doom, or gardeners for terrestrial life? Continental crust is vital in most of Earth’s natural cycles – it interacts with water and oxygen, forming new weathered products, hosting most metals and biological carbon. Large meteorite impacts are cataclysmic events that can obliterate life. Yet, impacts may very well have been key to the development of the continental crust we live on. With the recent passage of interstellar asteroids through the Solar System, some have even gone so far as to suggest they ferried life across the cosmos. However we came to be here, it is awe-inspiring on a clear night to look up at the sky and see the stars and the structure they trace, and then look down at your feet and feel the mineral grains, rock, and continental crust below – all linked through a very grand rhythm indeed. By Chris Kirkland and Phil Sutton, THE CONVERSATION – from Science Alert
Evidence Elsewhere of Ice-Age Floods? Q – Is there evidence elsewhere in the world of ice age floods? Intuitively, I would think glaciers dammed other rivers, created lakes and then eventually collapsed? A – Your instincts are correct. The rivers with big ice and big gorges pretty much all had outburst floods on them. The St. Lawrence Seaway is a flood path as is the Strait between Denmark and Norway and the English channel at the Dover Straits. The Altai Mountain Floods in Mongolia were very steep and fast much like Lake Missoula. The latitude where the ice was melting on its own appears to be more susceptible to very large floods. The Tibetan Plateau also had a series of large floods. Geologist Dr. Vic Baker has created an info-graphic comparing the scale of several terrestrial and Martian flood volumes, though not all are ice-age floods.
Moses Coulee, a Washington state wonder, has puzzled geologists for over a century. This massive canyon, carved into solid basalt, stands as a testament to some powerful force. The culprit? The Ice Age Floods, a series of catastrophic deluges that reshaped the landscape. If you’ve ever visited, or even just passed through Moses Coulee, you may not have been aware that this awe-inspiring coulee has been an Ice Age Floods conundrum since the time geologist J Harlen Bretz first noted it in 1922. The problem? Moses Coulee doesn’t quite fit the picture. As Bretz described it, “The head of Moses Coulee is just north of Grimes Lake. It is an abrupt termination, walled by 100 foot cliffs, identical with the features of channeled scabland which are called abandoned cataracts.” The head of the coulee ends abruptly, lacking any clear connection to the known flood paths. Theorists proposed a missing link, a path obliterated by the Okanagan Ice Lobe, but no evidence of such a grand passage has ever been found. The mystery has persisted and become more enigmatic as Ice Age Floods research has flourished over the years: what colossal force carved this immense coulee? A new study by Gombiner and Lesemann (Geology, 2024) offers a radical new hypothesis. They propose a surprising source for flood waters: meltwater trapped beneath the massive Okanagan Ice Lobe glacier. Imagine the giant Okanagan ice sheet pressing down on the Waterville Plateau. Meltwater pooled in valleys beneath the ice, trapped and pressurized. This water, according to the theory, found a surprising escape route. Flowing through a network of hidden channels, it carved its way across intervening ridges and valleys, eventually funneling into Moses Coulee. This “tunnel channel network,” as the researchers describe it, explains the unusual path of the water. The channels themselves, carved in basalt, climb slopes and defy normal drainage patterns. These features, along with glacial landforms like eskers, suggest a watery escape route beneath the ice sheet. The study doesn’t rule out the role of traditional Ice Age Floods. Water from massive glacial lakes might have also contributed to Moses Coulee’s formation by flowing along the eastern edge of the glacier. This new hypothesis could be a game-changer. It suggests a hidden world of pressurized meltwater sculpting the landscape beneath the ice. While the debate continues, one thing is certain: Moses Coulee remains a captivating enigma, a place where the power of water and ice continues to unfold its secrets.
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 in lower Lincoln Park. How did these form? Do they indicate the location of a volcanic vent? – John Ludders A1 – The picture is a large chunk of chill zone basalt. The sequence is chill zone, columnar basalt, entablature, capped by chill zone of the next flow. Like the columns, the chill zone is resistant to plucking but is weak and susceptible to hammering and chipping from rocks in the flow. Many are huge but are basically made in place by chipping, not being carried by flow. – Jim Shelden A2 – The basalt boulder appears to be a portion of the entablature portion of the basalt flow. This portion of the flow commonly worked on by the floodwaters is undercut and portions fall off and get rolled downstream. I have noted hundreds of these boulders in the Spokane area below basalt exposures (cliffs) especially along the north hills (north of Spokane River). They are analogous to the basalt boulders that are observed below Dry Falls (along Umatilla Rock-west side) as seen from the Dry Falls visitor center. The only difference is that the Spokane area gets more precipitation allowing ponderosa pines to grow around them. Also I am not aware that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet advanced south enough into the Spokane vicinity so the basalt boulders are not erratics or “haystack rocks” left after glacial melt. – Brent Cunderla
Quaternary—What is that??? Ice Age Floods Institute Members may have heard the term Quaternary during Chapter Presentations and Field Trips, or may have learned that the Quaternary Period represents the last 2.588 million years (~2.6 million years) of earth history, or that it is divided into the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs. The Quaternary began with the Pleistocene (~2.6 million years ago) and the strata and landscape features reflect the major climate changes of the last Ice Age (synonymous with the Pleistocene Epoch). But where did the term Quaternary come from? The word suggests the number four as in quadrangle, quadrant, quadruplet, etc. For its origins we need to go back a few hundred years to see how the geologic time scale in use today had its origins. The science of geology had a very slow start only beginning to take hold in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Both Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795) a mining geologist studying the rock layers in northern Italy around 1759 and Jules Desnoyers working in the Seine Basin in France in 1829 divided their rock sequences into four units; Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary. The term Quaternary was applied by Desnoyers to the fourth more recent strata that consists of loose to poorly indurated or cemented strata. The terms Primary and Secondary have been dropped but Tertiary and Quaternary are still used today. These attempts to develop a regional framework of strata were based on the publication of a paper by NIcholaus Steno in 1669 where he laid out the geologic Principle of Superposition. He argued that lower strata in a tectonically undisturbed section must be older than those on top. He also pointed out that strata tend to be deposited in a horizontal position, the law of Original Horizontality. How old these strata might be was not known, new tools would need to be developed to answer that question. However, that is another story. Gene Kiver June 2020
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 to 3,000 feet (455 to 910 m) high in the area where they covered the ice-free corridor,” according to study lead author Jorie Clark, a geologist and archaeologist at Oregon State University. Clark said, “we now have robust evidence that the ice-free corridor was not open and available for the [Late Pleistocene] first peopling of the Americas.” If evidence of humans in the Americas prior to the 30,000 years ago is ultimately found, that evidence does not preclude the possibility of ice-free corridor migration before closure of the corridor.
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