The Missoula floods, during one of which 530 cubic miles of water (about half the amount of water in Lake Michigan), was released in three days.
Cataclysms on the Columbia by John Eliot Allen, Marjorie Burns and Scott Burns
Cataclysms on the Columbia tells two stories. One follows geological research that challenged the scientific paradigm of the early 20th century, and the other chronicles the results of that research: the discovery of powerful prehistoric floods that shaped the Pacific Northwest. The last Ice Age left scabland buttes, dry falls, and old river channels in its wake, but it took the detective work of geologist J. Harlen Bretz to prove it to the world. With a lifetime of research and an unshakeable belief, Bretz made history and changed geology forever.
Purchased at Time Enough Books in Ilwaco, WA.
xiii - 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, 40 to 90 tremendous deluges swept the Columbia River drainage area
xiii - Missoula floods
xiii - channeled scablands
xvi - map of Missoula Floods
24 - J Harlen Bretz - spent 40 years defending his thesis of the flood
29 - Dry Falls in the Grand Coulee
30 - riverbed potholes
32 - Quincy basin - giant potholes, up to a quarter mile wide
33 - erratics - large rocks, far from their source
34 - Bretz hypothesizes erratics transported by floating icebergs
38 - braiding pattern ( anastomosing ) in scablands
41 - river eddies - and sediment ounds
44 - catastrophism vs uniformitarianism
45 - "Theory of the Earth", by James Hutton in 1788
47 - plunge pools
48 - hanging valleys
54 - Wallula gap
67 - Joseph Pardee - Lake Missoula
67 - ripple marks on the floor sediments of Lake Missoula - p. 69 - Merkel Pass
70 - 1952 expedition - hypothesize multiple floods
78 - mega floods in Siberia and possibly Mars
79 - rhythmites
79 - tephra
79 - krotovinas - animal burrows within rhythmites
80 - 40 floods, 30 to 60 years between
80 - Pend Oreille Trench
80 - Icelandic model of jokulhlaups - or glacial outburst floods
85 - Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail and NPS map
88 - Columbia River Basalt Group
89 - Ice Age - started 2.6 million years ago
89 - ~20 advances and retreats of the ice sheet
90 - Palouse Formation
91 - Chehalis river
(96 + 2) - fig. 4-1 - color, Dry Falls, WA
(97 - 1) - fig. 23-1 - color, photo recreation of downtown Portland with Missoula flood levels for water
101 - varves
105 - ice dam ~30 miles across - map p. 106, fig. 16-2
111 - gulch fillings
113 - glacial Lake Columbia - p. 114
117 - Grand Coulee and Moses Coulee
119 - talus cones or scree
118 - Okanogan Glacial lobe
120 - Withrow Moraine
122 - Dry Falls - five times the width of Niagra Falls
129 - Palouse falls
133 - Wallula Gap and Lake Lewis
134 - touchet beds
141 - largest historical flood on the Columbia in 1948 was 0.7 cubic miles/day for 3 days
144 - Hat Rock
145 - flow - breccia
147 - Columbia Gorge ( Long Narrows )
153 - faceted spurs
155 - mima mounds
157 - Bonneville Landslide in 1450 AD
157 - colluvium - loose collection of rock material
158 - Rooster Rock
165 - water escape features
165 - giant meanders
166 - the Manning Kyanite
168 - the Gladstone Baculite
170 - Lake Allison
172 - hydraulic dam
181 - Pacific Ocean was 300 feet lower in elevation during the Ice Age
186 - paleomagnetism
186 - Brunhes-Matayama boundary
186 - cataclysmic floods before the Missoula floods
197 - Appendix C - table of catastrophic events and the corresponding energy produced
xiii - "The floods originated from Glacial Lake Missoula in western Montana. At maximum size, this lake was 2,100 feet deep and held over 530 cubic miles of water, all of which was released in three days when an ice dam of 50 cubic miles broke. All of this water and ice was sent cataclysmically westward across Eastern Washington, scouring wherever it went. The water was slowed down periodically by gaps in the topography, creating temporary lakes along the way."
31 - "The Dutch have a word for these : kolk, the depression formed below a break in a dike by the swirling waters."
107 - "This tells us that the ice-dam held for fewer years each time the lake refilled."
159 - "Subsequent erosion by the river of the dam resulted in the 'Cascades of the Columbia', first described by Lewis and Clark in 1805, from which the name of the Cascade Range of mountains was derived. The Cascades are now submerged beneath the water behind the Bonneville Dam."