Palouse River
Once upon a time, great fissures opened up below earth and caused eruptions of molten rock that rolled up to four hundred miles across the landscape, pooling into vast basins that eventually covered an area almost as extensive as New England and New York State combined. Over forty of these great floods of magma occurred, spaced over twelve million years, and ultimately covering with dense basalt one hundred thousand square miles to an average depth of almost a mile.
Ice sheets then advanced, one of which formed a natural dam across a river, causing water to back up and form an enormous lake. When this water eventually broke the dam down, five hundred cubic miles of water roared forwards in a wall as high as a thousand feet high, moving as fast as fifty-eight miles an hour. These new floods contained ten times the volume of all the water in world, scouring the land before it and carving new landscapes within days, a process that occurred not once, but maybe up to a hundred times!
Accounts like these sound cataclysmic, even biblical in proportion, as though we were reading about the end of the world, the arrival of Doomsday. Yet this is what has happened in the Columbia Plateau. When these theories were first brought forward in 1923, by a brave and intuitive man named J. Harlan Bretz, they were ridiculed and dismissed. After all, geologists and most of the general public had only just embraced the idea that the earth was not created exactly as we see it just six thousand years ago, but was actually almost unimaginably old (4.6 billion years old), and that the landscapes that surround us were shaped slowly and gradually by erosion, sedimentation and mountain building. This new theory of “Uniformitarianism” replaced Genesis and “Catastrophism”, so anything that remotely hinted of the biblical was automatically shunned, as a major setback in our new concept of the planet we live in.
However, evidence became irrefutable, and the signs of these mind-boggling events are nowhere clearer than along the Palouse River. What a humbling experience to kayak or take Zodiac cruises within what are actually giant river beds and formations caused by water flows of unimaginable size. These are even clearer due to the low, desert-like vegetation of these sagebrush steppes. The tall Cascade mountain range that hugs the coast steals the moisture from the Pacific air masses, and creates a rain shadow over the eastern plateau, which receives at best nine inches of rain a year! Along the shores of the Palouse today we also observed a varied wildlife that included perfectly camouflaged mammals such as a coyote, a mink and several mule deer; all this with the backdrop of a perfect sunny day.
Once upon a time, great fissures opened up below earth and caused eruptions of molten rock that rolled up to four hundred miles across the landscape, pooling into vast basins that eventually covered an area almost as extensive as New England and New York State combined. Over forty of these great floods of magma occurred, spaced over twelve million years, and ultimately covering with dense basalt one hundred thousand square miles to an average depth of almost a mile.
Ice sheets then advanced, one of which formed a natural dam across a river, causing water to back up and form an enormous lake. When this water eventually broke the dam down, five hundred cubic miles of water roared forwards in a wall as high as a thousand feet high, moving as fast as fifty-eight miles an hour. These new floods contained ten times the volume of all the water in world, scouring the land before it and carving new landscapes within days, a process that occurred not once, but maybe up to a hundred times!
Accounts like these sound cataclysmic, even biblical in proportion, as though we were reading about the end of the world, the arrival of Doomsday. Yet this is what has happened in the Columbia Plateau. When these theories were first brought forward in 1923, by a brave and intuitive man named J. Harlan Bretz, they were ridiculed and dismissed. After all, geologists and most of the general public had only just embraced the idea that the earth was not created exactly as we see it just six thousand years ago, but was actually almost unimaginably old (4.6 billion years old), and that the landscapes that surround us were shaped slowly and gradually by erosion, sedimentation and mountain building. This new theory of “Uniformitarianism” replaced Genesis and “Catastrophism”, so anything that remotely hinted of the biblical was automatically shunned, as a major setback in our new concept of the planet we live in.
However, evidence became irrefutable, and the signs of these mind-boggling events are nowhere clearer than along the Palouse River. What a humbling experience to kayak or take Zodiac cruises within what are actually giant river beds and formations caused by water flows of unimaginable size. These are even clearer due to the low, desert-like vegetation of these sagebrush steppes. The tall Cascade mountain range that hugs the coast steals the moisture from the Pacific air masses, and creates a rain shadow over the eastern plateau, which receives at best nine inches of rain a year! Along the shores of the Palouse today we also observed a varied wildlife that included perfectly camouflaged mammals such as a coyote, a mink and several mule deer; all this with the backdrop of a perfect sunny day.
