Sharing the Fascinating Ice Age Floods Story Since 1995
A large number of important articles get buried over time as new articles are added to our website, so here’s a chance to review and relive some of our most important articles. We think you might enjoy reviewing these timeless features.
The Glacial Lake Missoula chapter has worked with Inspired Classroom LLC to produce a series of 9 short (3-7 minute) videos exploring different aspects of the Ice Age Floods in the Glacial Lake Missoula area. The entire set is posted to the Inspired Classroom LLC YouTube channel, including a full 31 minute version (below) that compiles the entire set.
No one can ever say for sure what the future will bring, but this new video has summed up all the science-backed predictions that we can reasonably make about how Earth will change over the next 1 billion years. It’s highly unlikely that anyone will be around to see most of these changes come to pass, so consider this an exclusive front-row seat to a world where supercontinents reign supreme, Mount Everest is no longer the tallest mountain on our planet, Earth enters another glacial period regardless of current global warming trends. and then the Sun becomes a lot hotter. Just another reason we should be glad we live at the time we do. Reposted from Science Alert and RealLifeLore
A recent Smithsonian Magazine article gives some interesting insights to present-day Jökulhlaups (glacial outburst floods) that are but minuscule relatives of the cataclysmic Ice Age Floods. Iceberg Lake was on the edge of a western tributary of the Tana Glacier, but in 1999 the lake suddenly vanished. Dammed on its southern end by ice, the water, with persistently warming temperatures, had bored a hole under the ice and escaped through tunnels to emerge ten miles away and empty into the Tana River. The sudden drainage of a glacier-dammed lake is not uncommon. “Some lakes in Wrangell-St. Elias regularly drain,” Loso said. Hidden Creek Lake, for instance, near McCarthy, drains every summer, pouring millions of gallons through channels in the Kennicott Glacier. The water gushes out the terminus of the Kennicott, causing the Kennicott River to flood, an event called a jokulhlaup—an Icelandic word for a glacial-lake outburst flood. “The Hidden Creek jokulhlaup is so reliable,” said Loso, “it has become one of the biggest parties in McCarthy.” But the disappearance of Iceberg Lake was different, and unexpected. It left an immense trench in the ground, the ghost of a lake, and it never filled up again. The roughly six-square-mile mudhole turned out to be a glaciological gold mine. The mud, in scientific terms, was laminated lacustrine sediment. Each layer represented one year of accumulation: coarse sands and silts, caused by high runoff during the summer months, sandwiched over fine-grained clay that settled during the long winter months when the lake was covered in ice. The mud laminations, called varves, look like tree rings. Using radiocarbon dating, Loso and his colleagues determined that Iceberg Lake existed continuously for over 1,500 years, from at least A.D. 442 to 1998. “In the fifth century the planet was colder than it is today,” Loso said, “hence the summer melt was minimal and the varves were correspondingly thin.” The varves were thicker during warmer periods, for instance from A.D. 1000 to 1250, which is called the Medieval Warming Period by climatologists. Between 1500 and 1850, during the little ice age, the varves were again thinner—less heat means less runoff and thus less lacustrine deposition. “The varves at Iceberg Lake tell us a very important story,” Loso said. “They’re an archival record that proves there was no catastrophic lake drainage, no jokulhlaup, even during the Medieval Warming Period.” In a scientific paper about the disappearance of Iceberg Lake, Loso was even more emphatic: “Twentieth-century warming is more intense, and accompanied by more extensive glacier retreat, than the Medieval Warming Period or any other time in the last 1,500 years.” Loso scratched his grizzled face. “When Iceberg Lake vanished, it was a big shock. It was a threshold event, not incremental, but sudden. That’s nature at a tipping point.” One of the most startling, and devastating, consequences of this rapid melting of the ice was the Icy Bay landslide. The Tyndall Glacier, on the southern coast of Alaska, has been retreating so quickly that it is leaving behind steep, unsupported walls of rock and dirt. On October 17, 2015, the largest landslide in North America in 38 years crashed down in the Taan Fjord. The landslide was so enormous it was detected by seismologists at Columbia University in New York. Over 200 million tons of rock slid into the Taan Fjord in about 60 seconds. This, in turn, created a tsunami that was initially 630 feet high and roared down the fjord, obliterating virtually everything in its path even as it diminished to some 50 feet after ten miles. “Alder trees 500 feet up the hillsides were ripped away,” Anderson says. “Glacial ice is buttressing the mountainsides in Alaska, and when this ice retreats, there is a good chance for catastrophic landslides.” In other ranges, such as the Alps and the Himalaya, he says, the melting of “ground ice,” which sort of glues rock masses to mountainsides, can release enormous landslides into populated valleys, with devastating consequences. “For most humans, climate change is an abstraction,” Loso says when I meet him in his office, which is down a long, dark, heavily beamed mine building in Kennecott. “It’s moving so slowly as to be basically imperceptible. But not here! Here glaciers tell the story. They’re like the world’s giant, centuries-old thermometers.” Read the entire article “A Daring Journey Into the Big Unknown of America’s Largest National Park” online at SmithsonianMag.com
Big feet. Little feet. A heel here. A toe there. A digitally enhanced photo of a footprint found at Calvert Island, British Columbia that researchers dated to 13,000 years old. Credit Duncan McLaren Stamped across the shoreline of Calvert Island, British Columbia, are 13,000-year-old human footprints that archaeologists believe to be the earliest found so far in North America. The finding, which was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, adds support to the idea that some ancient humans from Asia ventured into North America by hugging the Pacific coastline, rather than by traveling through the interior. “This provides evidence that people were inhabiting the region at the end of the last ice age,” said Duncan McLaren, an anthropologist at the Hakai Institute and University of Victoria in British Columbia and lead author of the study. “It is possible that the coast was one of the means by which people entered the Americas at that time.” Dr. McLaren and his colleagues stumbled upon the footprints while digging for sediments beneath Calvert Island’s beach sands. Today, the area is covered with thick bogs and dense forests that the team, which included representatives from the Heiltsuk First Nation and Wuikinuxv First Nation, could only access by boat. At the close of the last ice age, from 11,000 to 14,000 years ago, the sea level was six to ten feet lower. The footprints were most likely left in an area that was just above the high tide line. “As this island would only have been accessible by watercraft 13,000 years ago,” Dr. McLaren said, “it implies that the people who left the footprints were seafarers who used boats to get around, gather and hunt for food and live and explore the islands.” They found their first footprint in 2014. While digging about two feet beneath the surface in a 20-square-inch hole, they saw an impression of something foot-shaped in the light brown clay. In 2015 and 2016, they returned and expanded the muddy pit. They discovered several more steps preserved in the sediment. The prints were of different sizes and pointed in different directions. Most were right feet. When the team was finished they had counted 29 in total, possibly belonging to two adults and a child. Each was barefoot. The researchers think that after the people left their footprints on the clay, their impressions were filled in by sand, thick gravel and then another layer of clay, which may have preserved them. Using radiocarbon dating on sediment from the base of some footprint impressions, as well as two pieces of preserved wood found in the first footprint, Dr. McLaren and his team found them to be 13,000 years old. That would make them the oldest preserved human footprints in North America. “It’s not only the footprints themselves that are spectacular and so rare in archaeological context, but also the age of the site,” said Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany who edited the paper for PLOS One but was not involved in the work. “It suggests an early entrance into the Americas.” Dr. Petraglia said the footprints also provided strong evidence for the coastal movement hypothesis and he added that they may have traveled the so-called “Kelp Highway,” a hypothesis that underwater kelp forests supported ecosystems down the North Pacific coast that helped ancient seafaring people hunt, develop and migrate. “The work is important because it shows the ‘real’ people, not just artifacts or skeletal remains,” said Steve Webb, a biological archaeologist at Bond University in Australia. “However, the footprints are limited in number and don’t shed light on activities or movement that tell us very much.” He added that future hunts for footprints should keep in mind that not everyone from this time period walked around barefoot. If anthropologists are too busy searching for soles, toes and arches, they might miss clues from those who wore animal skin shoes. Reprinted from New York Times – Earliest Known Human Footprints in North America Found on Canadian Island By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR, March 28, 2018
There is considerable controversy regarding when humans first migrated into the Americas and whether they might have been in the local area during any of the Ice Age Floods. This 2016 video, produced by reputable sources, doesn’t answer that question, but it is an interesting and instructive visualization of human migration paths and timing over the past 200,000 years.
There’s a Columbian Mammoth hiding out in Coyote Canyon down Kennewick way, and MCBONES Research Center Foundation is working to uncover his/her hiding place. For a small contribution you can tour this hide-and-seek site, or you can volunteer to help uncover the hidden mammoth. Sound interesting? Find out more in this short video produced by Mark Harper of “Smart Shoot“, or visit the MCBONES website. The Mid-Columbia Basin Old Natural Education Sciences (MCBONES) Research Center Foundation provides local K-12 teachers and their students, as well as other volunteers, an opportunity to actively participate in laboratory and field-based research in paleontology, geology, paleoecology, and other natural sciences primarily within the Mid-Columbia Region of southeast Washington State.
Scenic Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve area provide an incredibly scenic place to let your feet, and your imagination wander as you look out on a major chokepoint along the Ice Age Floods path. The wildflower displays are amazing during the Spring, but several compelling flood-related features are visible from the vantage of the Rowena Crest Viewpoint any time of year. Rowena Crest lies nearly 700 feet above the Columbia River at the upstream end of the Rowena Plateau, a miles-long plateau that the river flows along. Just upriver from the plateau is the narrow section of the Gorge known as the Rowena Gap The drive to the viewpoint on old Hwy 30 from either east or west is a spectacular ride through a wonderous section of the Columbia River Gorge. A roundabout parking area at the viewpoint, with a safety wall above a sheer cliff, provides a great observation point eastward toward Rowena Gap. At Rowena Crest it’s easy to imagine what it might have been like to witness the approach of those massive floods. There is not yet scientific evidence that humans were in the area to bear witness to the Ice Age Floods, but there is solid evidence of humans in the Americas by that time. And there is growing concensus that if they came in during a glacial maximum, they would have come in by a coastal route that offered plentiful food and shelter for their journey. The mouth of the Columbia River would have been the first major waterway path inland that might have led them to settle in the area of the Floods. Your village might have been situated across the Columbia at the mouth of the Klickitat River where the town of Lyle now sits. If you were foraging, or just relaxing, atop Rowena Crest on a late summer day, you might have felt the ground begin to temble as if there were a small earthquake, but the trembling would have slowly increased for a few hours. Eventually you would have heard a low roaring sound that also grew over an hour or more before you could see turbulent brown muddy water begin flooding across the broad basin to the east. Then the roaring flood of water, only a few feet deep at first, would have entered the narrows, now called Rowena Gap, and sped on, crashing against the promontory you’re standing on and being diverted toward your village which was quickly washed away by the muddy torrent. But the muddy flood waters would have kept rising, unlike the Spring floods you’re used to on the Columbia, becoming a hundred feet deep, then two hundred as the levels just kept rising. Soon a huge whirlpool formed in the flood waters near the base of the promontory and a giant eddy formed where your village had been as flood waters flowed backward up the Klickitat River even as the bulk of the water continued downstream on the main stem of the Columbia. As the flood waters reached 400 and 500 feet deep and kept coming, suddenly to your right and left, huge blocks of the promontory broke off and slumped down into the rampaging flood waters. Now, even more fearful, you would have begun running south toward higher ground, climbing higher and higher as the still rising flood waters poured across the plateau and plunged into the small creek valley to the west, tearing away at the valley walls and massively widening that little valley. Eventually the flood waters stopped chasing you upward as you climbed higher, 200 then 300 feet above the now submerged promontory. Now, as you turned and looked out across that expanse of muddy water you could see massive white blocks of ice being carried along on the flood waters, similar but inconceivably larger than the ice blocks carried on the river during the Spring floods. But the flood waters didn’t begin to recede that day, nor the next, as they might in the Spring floods. In fact it was almost half a lunar cycle before they began to slowly recede, exposing a mud coated Columbia River valley that was now noticeably wider, with layers of shear vertical rock walls extending over 1000 feet above the normal river level below. As you began the recovery from the floods devastation, your family returned from from their hunting and gathering in the high mountain meadows, and you have an incredible story to pass along to them and your ancestors. This story is easy to imagine as you look out to the east from Rowena Crest. The onrushing Ice Age Floods waters easily flowed over the low relief of the broad Dalles Basin to the east, but the major Rowena Gap created a chokepoint in the path of the floods as they made their way through the Columbia River Gorge. This “hydraulic dam” forced the flood waters to build to over 1000 feet deep in this area, flowing hundreds of feet deep over Rowena Crest while forming a temporary lake in The Dalles basin. It is estimated that many of the 40-100 Ice Age Floods may have taken up to a month to completely flush through the system to the Pacific Ocean, but the duration of the flood waters at any point along the path probably lasted less than a couple of weeks. But this was more than enough to create several major floods features visible from this vantage point. At Columbia River level below and east of the promontory is a round Kolk pond that was created by giant whirlpools in the flood waters as they were deflected around the Rowena Crest promontory. Other similar Kolk features can also be seen on the Dallesport area to the east, and along the hiking path atop Rowena Crest where they are marked by surrounding groves of oak trees. Across the Columbia, the floods deposited a huge eddy gravel bar that the entire town of Lyle, Washington is built upon. The Klickitat River was backed
Bluefish Caves directly challenged mainstream scientific thinking. Evidence had long suggested that humans first reached the Americas around 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska and Yukon during the last ice age. From there, the migrants seemed to have hurried southward along the edges of melting ice sheets to warmer lands in what is now the United States, where they and their descendants thrived. Researchers called these southern hunters the Clovis people, after a distinctive type of spear point they carried. And the story of their arrival in the New World became known as the Clovis first model. Jacques Cinq-Mars, however, didn’t buy that story—not a bit.