A megaflood-carved coulee just as large and impressive as Grand Coulee, yet more remote and less crowded. And the only flood coulee once blocked by a glacier.
I have lived in eastern Washington almost my entire life but I have never been to this place. That is a mistake I need to rectify next year. Excellent video and drone work.
Great documentation. As a geologist myself and having been to some of these locations, the entire history became alive. Thanks so much for posting this. This entire area is a geological Paradise.
Watching Nick Z's videos have brought me to this Bruce. This is excellent work! I like the commentary, descriptions, and other additions do not distract from the pure beauty of this place. I am just now watching the videos with Nick letting Randy Lewis tell the indigenous stories. Thank you again Bruce, what a wonderful, outstanding video!
I’m relieved you said there’s no obvious connection to glacial lake Missoula floods. I’ve been flying over these parts for decades into Seattle. The fact that the coulee starts with a giant pucker in the plateau is pretty plain to see from up high and has always confused me. It’s especially exciting to learn from you and Prof. Zentner how old these coulees might be, and how many more flood cycles it probably went through in its formation than commonly thought.
Fantastic footage ! Every time we drive to Jameson lake to fish I marvel at the basalt cliffs while I float around, or a trout is pulling me around. Wonderland ! TXS
I flew in a single engine plane from spokane, over the scablands and all the way to grand coulee today, 3/13/21. Circled the potholes area and came back over Moses Coulee. The most incredible thing ever. No words.
Right? 16,000 years later and the land still has not fully recovered. Mind blowing. When we talk about modern floods, we talk about water in terms of square feet per second. The floods from these glacial lakes were square miles per second. Try and wrap your head around that! At those volumes, water starts acting in ways that we don't see on a large scale these days. I would guess that the potholes were created by massive amounts of cavitation. Cavitation is where water goes past a slight deformation creating bubbles which explode with greater force than dynamite. It can easily eat away concrete, and has done so (examples: the Ororville Dam spillway failure, and damage done to the spillway tubes of the Glenn Canyon Dam during massive water releases in the early 1980's). The pounding that the bedrock took during such an event makes my head spin. Like you said, "No words."
@@thesquatch9363 well if you ever feel up to it, I'd love to see you upload them to your page. I frequent that area multiple times a year. Its beautiful just from the ground.
The peaceful pace of these beautiful films is so at odds with the catastrophic events which shaped this landscape. Thank you so much for giving this old lady the opportunity to see this. J Harlan Bretz did not study this from the air. He hiked over it year after year and used his scientific knowledge and imagination to figure it out. All he lacked was a source for the water which he knew had scraped this landscape clean. Thanks again.
To think that such a cataclysmic event could happen in such a shorty amount of time to create unbelievable geological features like this is mind boggling
It's so amazing to look at the planet and see the remains of millions of years of history. I live in a very densely populated area (SF BAY AREA), but even here I don't have to go far at all to see geological history. However, this is so untouched by humans, it evokes a different kind of awe. Thank you for these aerial views. I feel awe struck.
I live in south central area of British Columbia in Kamloops .There is evidence of an ancient glacial lake all around us here; we now live on what would have been the bottom of Lake Kamloops .
Geology cares nothing about national borders. It would be fascinating to know where that water went, and what it did. Are there any scab lands in BC? There's always the possibility that one broke loose early on in the glaciation, and that the advancing glaciers erased all evidence of it. If that were the case, one would need to rely on ocean cores of the coast to find the evidence. We know people were living on the North American continent prior to all this, but we find no evidence of it on the west coast or anywhere within 1,000 miles of it. Could it be that it all simply washed away?
Stunning visuals I wish someday soon some computer geek with talent could do a realistic visualization of the Missoula floods and how enormous they really were
Fascinating! I can see ... but ... it's on a scale I was not fully prepared for! Even knowing the theory but, BEAUTIFULLY shown by your wonderful photography. Absolutely stunning video and what an amasing landscape! WOW
I have driven and car camped all over the scab lands. Do it if you if you get a chance. Only the need to work for gas money and food stopped me from doing more exploring.
0:00 - Holy Massive Floodscapes, Batman! My mind can almost see the brown waters flowing at incredible speeds over this terrain. Almost. I want to see some high quality time-lapse animations/simulations which show us how this stunning terrain is created, and over what period! Because here in New Zealand we get the occasional volcanic lahar, and the odd river burst its banks - but you could drop lil ol' NZ in this flood plain, and not even notice it!
It’s easy to see from an aerial view how the flood water cut thru the basalt to form the terrain. Driving thru these areas it easy to over look the beauty of the landscape. In the middle of the hot summer there is very little if any green mostly browns and tans. This had to be taken in the spring. Awesome!
The unexplained origin is that this is an ancient form of mining. This wasn't washed out it was dug out, mined and then the mining waste was dumped in the middle.
Beautiful and timeless. The drone footage really helps capture the unbelievable scale of what happened here so long ago. What is the wonderful music playing in the background?
@@bjornstad51 Thanks Bruce! Your videos are great and looking forward to learning more about that area and amazing geologic history. Just ordered your Ice Age Floods field guide for my next trip out to Moses Coulee.
A like minded friend and I (we travelled to UFO conventions and are ufo nuts) have turned to geology. It's like looking at the work of a fellow human. The characters are the ice, the water, the impounded water, the loess, the basalt columns. Water and silicone with a handful of elements took form and came to life with energy and purpose.. We're driving from Portland area to Moses coulee tomorrow and all points in between . We have studied all your books, I think. Thank you for your work. Thank you.
BEAUTIFUL - great perspective. Makes me want to have invested more time since I was last there when the mammoths were still around and I didn’t even have ‘Kodachrome’ - THANKS - more please and thank you 😁
I'll bet you could hear those things roaring hundreds of miles away. In some places it looks as if the landscape has still not recovered. Just scraped clean above the cliffs. There were people on the North American continent 16,000 years ago. We know that from the Meadowcroft dig, and several other sites. What must it have been like to be anywhere near the area when that happened? If there were people in North America at the time (and all the evidence is there were), they had to have been taking advantage of resources in the area, just as they were from the eastern half of the continent all the way down to Tiera del Fuego. No wonder we don't see evidence of anything earlier than 15,000 years ago in that area. Probably explains why we see no evidence for or against a coastal migration of people from Baringia south. You wouldn't see that until you were south of where those ancient floods entered the sea. Were the potholes caused by cavitation as the water roared past, or did something else cause those?
Think I read it was whirlpools. Global warming? Uh for a while. Lewis or Clark wrote you could hear the Columbia river cascades at hood river from 4 miles away. All blasted and cleaned away now.
@@usakicksass Yes, and there must have been some unimaginable ones! I would think that whirlpools on that scale would have caused cavitation like nothing else. Nature's jackhammers were working overtime when those floods were raging!
Not true. Lake Missoula may be comparatively minuscule, but not the amount of water that flowed into the oceans. The oceans rose a total of about 400 feet in at least two flows at the end of the last ice age due to outflows from the melting ice sheets. It would make sense that water was flowing out from under the ice sheets pretty much all along its edge, not just at a single point east of Clark Fork River feeding into Lake Missoula. However, Lake Missoula was nothing to sniff at. It's volume was the same order of magnitude as Lake Michigan.
@@dlwatib First of all, Bruce is talking about the effects that the draining of Lake Missoula would have on global sea levels; not the effect all of the ice age glaciers melting would have on global sea levels. Second of all, Bruce Bjornstad is a brilliant geologist who has studied these things for decades so I'm not sure why you feel at all qualified to say he is mistaken...
Bruce, is it possible that there was a glacial lake in BC (north of Moses Coulee) that quickly drained by an ice damage rupture similar to Lake Missoula? Could this be the source of the water that eroded this Coulee system? Fantastic job capturing the features, beauty, and the mysteries of this landscape!
Area north of Moses Coulee was covered by ice during Ice Age. Would have had to be a subglacial lake to produce Moses Coulee. Richard Waitt has recently published evidence for Lake Missoula as the source earlier in the Ice Age before development of Grand Coulee.
State road maps are still available by Rand McNally co. or the Warren map co., usually sold in convenience stores, online, etc. I just bought Washington, Oregon and Calif. road maps, all 3 from Amazon for $10.. The roads, highways, are sufficient..
Bruce, I have several questions for a research project I am working on by Union Gap: How old is the Yakima River? Was it there before Flood Basalts? Read an article that stated Yakima flowed from Vantage 9 ma. ??? I am sure they meant Columbia River, and it basically went straight across what is now Hanford, is this true? I did see where Yakima River was moved during Ice Age Floods at Benton City, moving it north and around Horn Rapids area. What is source of Interbed material between Basalt layers in the 'Gap'? I read old reports identifying Ash from Cascades and alluvial (Yakima River?) Interbeds had to be present during individual lava flows, but before Anticline events. I can clearly see the slide on Rattlesnake. There are very thick interbeds visible. Along north side of Rattlesnake just east of Gap, thick layers of Interbed and other alluvial deposits. Some of the alluvial could have been deposited as the Anticlines were still forming. At the bases, some silts from Lake Lewis could be deposited as well. I mapped out Lake Lewis high water and there are alluvial deposits higher up hillsides. I did find several old geological surveys by N Campbell (my old Prof - YVC) These will be helpful. I am trying to track him down, found him in Arizona. Have many questions for him about this area. We know River was there before Anticlines - Trying to date these in order: Yakima River Flood Basalts Anticlines Lake Lewis - Ice Age Floods Present Day Thank you
You ask many questions, many of which haven’t been resolved because rivers and ridges are constantly in flux. Paleodrainage has been studied by many over the last few decades. Starting with work of Karl Fecht back in the 1980’s and more recently by Lydia Staish (USGS). Yakima R did flow through Badger Coulee earlier in ice age but eventually was plugged with flood deposits, which shifted the river north into Pasco Basin.
Great video Mr Bjornstad! There is a claim by a "cosmic scientist" that the talus slopes lining the walls of the coulee are debris fields left by the floods themselves. When viewed in your videos I can't help bu think they are talus slopes due to their vertical appearance from erosion from the basalt cliffs. Is there any validity to this claim that you are aware of?
Does anyone grow on top of the Mesas? Is it just rock on top or any soil? The reason I asked is that I was wondering if any of the Mesas can be farmed? Some of them look like you couldn’t get farm equipment to them.
Thats true,basalt,very thin wind blown soil,the good stuff worth farming is always in the valleys,think about the effort to drill for the water,the costs,the massive volume required,trucking fertile soil to the top of those mesas,study some more freind,basic common sense is a plus,thats all I got bro....
Very strange beautyfull landscapes. Why is it so barren? There should be groundwater, maybe too deep? Or is the ground too hard and the water ran down and out?
The megafloods stripped all the top soil away exposing the layers of basalt below. Basalt is an extremely dense rock (because of it's ferromagnesian (iron and magnesium) content); which makes it hard for ground water to penetrate/flow through it. Before the start of the megafloods this entire area most likely looked much like the Palouse in southeastern Washington (pictured here): www.sevenwondersofwashingtonstate.com/uploads/4/7/4/6/47460045/1929032_orig.jpg
It happened 40 times over 2000 years. Glacial ice cap advanced and plugged Lake Missoula’s drain, Lake Missoula rose and broke through the glacier - drain and repeat.
dlwatib is talking about ALL the meltwater from ALL the Earth's retreating glaciers. I think Ronald is asking about these specific Lake Missoula floods. And the answer to that is much smaller. The volume of Lake Missoula (2100 cu km) was about 0.00016% of the present-day volume of the oceans (1.335 billion cu km; I can't find any data for the volume of the oceans at the time). Let's say it fully emptied 100 times (for convenience - it was actually less than that). Since the ocean volume was smaller, let's say that all of those floods would have increased the ocean volume by 0.03%, total (this is an over-estimate). If we pretend that that equals a proportional increase in average ocean depth (which was ~400 m), that would correspond to an increase of 0.12 m (120 mm), so about 1.2 mm per flood. So not much, on one hand, but that's also an incredibly large amount, when you think about the entire planet. Remember that we tried to OVERestimate at every step, so the actual value was probably (much) less. Now, the problem with this sort of estimate is that it's almost impossible to talk about a specific event increasing sea level. How much of the water in Lake Missoula had recently been extracted from the ocean, and therefore didn't represent a true long-term increase in ocean storage? How recent is "recent"?
Bruce Bjornstad Thanks for the response, I value your work and the information you have shared. How much is unknown? Is the full event in question or is it just the details of the events that is the subject of discussion? As far as the missing “feeder channel”, the same happens at the head of nearly all of the channeled scablands and most coulees. For example, look at the Frenchman coulee where there is an appreciable distance before there is an obvious source of the water. The same thing all along the south side of lake Columbia where there is limited loess erosion before the channeling begins. Isn’t this because the water came out of lake Columbia as a sheet of slow moving water that is miles “wide” before coalescing and forming channels? Didn’t the water on the Waterville plateau came from the north (and possibly the western edge it appears) in the same manner, I.e., a sheet of slow moving water? From the air, it appears that the flood water generally traveled towards Mansfield in a running lake that was many miles wide and moving very slowly. erosion was very limited but there is some channeling and significant areas of exposed bedrock. In my mind, when the water was funneled to badger mountain there was a pre-existing valley (where all streams on the plateau would have combined) continuing to the Columbia. The flood water eventually created the coulee as it eroded and captured smaller contributing channels. Of course the okanogan lobe did a lot of erasing, but it does not appear that there was ever a single massive channel from the Columbia has been back-filled by the glacier. Thanks again Craig
Craig, I disagree. There is clear evidence for erosional channeling that lead into the heads of other coulees, including those within the Cheney-Palouse and Telford-Crab Creek Tracts and Frenchman Coulee. It's possible the feeder channel(s) leading into Moses Coulee are buried beneath deposits of the Okanogan Lobe or, as some geologists believe, floods came from beneath the Okanogan Lobe.
What do you think of the theory that the flood that created this was around 12,500 after comet fragments hit the Ice Sheets? and brought about the Younger Dryes?
There wan't just one flood but dozens of Ice Age floods between 14,000 to 18,000 calendar years ago. And these floods all occurred prior to the Younger Dryas (12,900-11,500 calendar years before present)! A asteroid/comet impact might explain a single flood but not repeated floods ever few dozen years. No physical evidence exists today for an asteroid/comet-generated flood, yet lots of visible evidence for repeated floods from Glacial Lake Missoula, in sedimentary deposits left behind by the floods. See ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-b9PJ7LPVGSA.html.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that these floods *all* occurred prior to the Younger Dryas. The ocean rises coincided with the warming events before and after the Younger Dryas, and the second was larger than the first. That additional ocean water had to come from the melting ice sheets somehow, and it didn't teleport.
Breathtaking! The sudden torrents of glacial floods must have been enormous! But the more important point is - What do you postulate was the catalyst that caused these enormous and catastrophic and sudden glacial melt (a) sun going nova (b) or polar flip? I have a sense that for this event to happen suddenly, it must have been a solar nova. . . what saith you?
Most mega floods in the scab lands were caused by natural ice dams on glacial Lake Missoula. The dam would periodocally give way. The answer is in their own back yard, not out in the solar system. Also look on youtube for Perito Moreno Glacier collapse, which gives way spectacularly almost every year. It's tiny compared to this, but shows one way a glacier releases backed up water. Also look up jökulhlaup, iceland glacial flood on youtube to see a glacial flood in action. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fJII-u-41Lg.html
@@melodiefrances3898 If you are interested in the geology of the pacific northwest: See the public lectures of Nick Zentner here on RU-vid! I never heard anyone explain that stuff in such an easy to understand way while always keeping up science standards. Greetings from Austria
There are the same land complexes of channels running into larger ones in Russia and Mongolia and other countries as seen from the ISS above earth. There were gigantic floods everywhere it seems…
This was not a rain event. Most of the flooding in that region was caused by the breaching of ice dams which formed across river valleys during the last glaciation (and perhaps one before, though from what I've read, that is still hotly debated. There was one flood (the Bonneville flood) which may have been caused by an earthquake, though the water flow was probably not as great with it as it was with the failure of the glacial dams, which happened over and over again. The water from these floods ran out all the way to the ocean, and there is evidence of this which shows up in core samples taken from the ocean floor off shore of Washington and Oregon. The thing to know and remember is that no amount of rain could let loose enough water in a short period of time to cause the damage we see. any one of the lakes formed behind fingers of the last glaciation easily could have though, since some of those lakes exceeded the size of the current Great Lakes. Imagine all that water draining out in a single 48 hour period, and you can see why it scraped the earth clean and created the cliff walls which we see today. Those were for a few astonishing days, gigantic waterfalls with water pouring over them at mind-boggling rates. These days we talk about floods waters passing in square feet per second. In the events in the Pacific Northwest we are talking square miles per second. That much water going past is hard to wrap one's mind around because even the worst floods in living memory have not exceeded square feet per second. Even when man made dams break we don't get flows on that scale. The lakes are so much smaller. How much is a foot compared to a mile? Now start to get a tiny bit of an idea of what the magnitude of this thing was.
New age background music required to blur truth, history, theories, millions or thousands of years, believers, skeptics, atheists, space and time physics, flat earth, deception, Einstein from Joe Average
This is not the only place that megafloods took place in North America. Use Google Earth or Maps in the Topographical mode and you will see underfed rivers in wide river valleys with bluffs on each side. Look at the Minnesota and Wisconsin Rivers as just two examples. The vast majority of the melt water of the North American Ice Caps went south yhtough the Mississippi. East through the St Lawrence, or north through the Meckenzie Hudso Strait. With some going down the river valleys of the East. The video mentions at least 5 mega floods. I think more. And not just during the Wisconsin Glacial Advance. Look at how wide the higher elevations of Moses Coulee are. And the height of the scree piled up against sides of the upper cliffs. Bretz believed that the large parts of the landscape were carved during ealier episodes of erosion. Possibly going back to the begining if tye Sangamonian Interglacial.
And totally wrong. Try 40 separate mega floods over a 2000 year period - about once every 50 years (but definitely a once in a lifetime event for anyone who saw them). That’s how many times Lake Missoula let go.
@@allangibson8494 Geez, that's a boat load of horseshit. Randall studies pasxt realities intens;y and simply makes observations. Tucker is a paid for mutt
@@brucefulper2433 Randall gets his science wrong more often than he gets it right. That’s a side effect of not knowing to look deeper before opening his mouth.
1:52 basalt columns in layers......3:58 Basalt Island.....basalt collumns….like the basalt columns in Scotland....= Ancient Pre Flood Silicon Tree like Devils Tower Wyoming...….Three Devils Mesa......Mesa = Plateau / Table Top Mountain…...3:11 basalt columns like Devils Tower Wyoming.....3:11 = Ancient Pre Flood Silicon Tree Stump...….4:34 basalt columns.....4:58 basalt columns in layers just like in Scotland...……….= Ancient Pre Flood Silicon TREE Stumps..............what do you think?
We have petrified tree trunks embedded in the basalt at several places in the Pacific Northwest (most notably at Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park in Washington), but that's not what you're seeing. Basalt columns are formed when basalt fractures into semi-crystalline shapes as it cools. Nothing to do with trees.
@@dlwatib There's a free standing petrified tree near the town of vantage (to the northwest on a ridge, not with the others in the state park) that is absolutely amazing. If these nuts took the time to go see it they could dispel these insane notions of "silicon trees".
The aerial videography is incredible thank you. Though there are a lot of theories one obvious fact is that a lot of water carved this out. Whereas I do not believe in carbon dating as it's been proved and every other method has been proved to try to date anything older than 3000 years old. Even some dinosaur bones are being found that have carbon-14 something which is claimed that can't be happening if it's over 5000, or some say up to 50,000 years old but not older. Right now the electric Universe model is trying to explain the Grand Canyon is being excavated by electrical discharges, and whereas I believe in the EU and its processes in the formation of the universe, they need to be careful not to exclude the obvious role of a massive amounts of water having carved the Grand Canyon and the Missoula flood zones and various other places around the Earth as being a fact. I believe that a global flood is a fact but that the water did not all recede at the same exact time. It also originally caused such a climate change as to cause freezing as we have found frozen mammoth so fresh that they were unable to fall over and still have fresh vegetation in their mouths. Something happened that was absolutely sudden and was initiated in a single day. Canyons that look just like this can be found outside of Mount Saint Helens and we're literally formed in a single day. By looking at it you would think it would have had to have taken thousands and thousands of years. Much of the water became landlocked like the Missoula flood zones through glaciers and were released later often times in stages. The giant Canyon such as the Marianas Trench likely opened up from the massive amounts of water and pressures and would have allowed a great deal of water to suddenly rush off come in fact they say the Missoula flood zones initiated upwards of 80 to 90 miles an hour. I think this is a likely source of the crab land Waters, but then again it could have been in stages as pointed out. Just because there are not obvious geological signs or connections between the two doesn't mean it didn't happen. Depending on the initial speed of the water and how it may have leveled out and then increased again when it approached different Terrain. Likewise the terrain from the Missoula flood zones releasing that amount of water you think would have been traceable all the way to the end but it's not..... Yet it had to have gone somewhere. It's also been shown that huge flooding events can mimic that of glaciation, even carrying Boulders that weigh tons and depositing them elsewhere, along with a great deal of scratching that can also take place through glaciation. It's almost impossible to really know for sure and it's absolutely impossible to know dates and true ages, and is usually dependent upon any individuals preconceived ideas as to what to expect. I do know that these type of geological evidence is of massive floods can be found from one corner of the Earth to the other. Regardless of theories, your videoography was wonderful.
Well your Electric Universe has some serious problems. In the standard model, the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion in its core. There the fusion of hydrogen into helium produces not only light and heat, but neutrinos. In the electric universe model, the Sun is lit by electrically excited plasma. This gives us two very clear predictions. The first is regarding neutrinos. The standard model predicts that the Sun will produce copious amounts of neutrinos due to nuclear interactions in its core. The EU model predicts the Sun should produce no neutrinos. The EU model clearly fails this test, because neutrinos are produced by the Sun. We have not only observed solar neutrinos, we have imaged the Sun by its neutrinos. We can trace the Glacial Lake flooding all the way out to the mouth of the Collumbia. Not sure how you don't know this already. Dating of the deposits are helped by a layer of Mt. Saint Helens ash. Glacial lakes were All around at the edges of the ice sheets. Glacial lake outbursts would be happening in many places. The Marianas trench is a subduction zone between plates and has nothing to do with 'floods'.
If you see someone trying to carbon date dinosaur fossils without using other dating systems in conjunction with it, then you know you're not dealing with actual scientists. Of course they're going to get wild results, since they're dating contamination and pushing the limits of the noise in carbon dating (the older the specimen, the lower the signal:noise ratio is).
No modern paleontologist dates dinosaur fossils with carbon 14 testing; as it only has a half-life of 5700 years. You are making the mistake many creationists make which is to confound carbon-14 testing (a specific test) with radiometric dating (a plethora of different dating tests). Paleontologists would actually use something like potassium-40 dating for testing dinosaur fossils which has a half-life of 1.25 billion years.
