Jerome Lesemann & Nick Zentner | May 19, 2022 Vancouver Island University's Jerome Lesemann shares his Okanogan Valley field work. Ripples site: goo.gl/maps/SD... Terraces site: goo.gl/maps/VV...
Jerome is fantastic at describing this landscape! Like we're standing there watching the floods at the end of the Ice Age. Thanks for getting Jerome back on camera Nick!
It's difficult to explain to most people why geology is so fascinating and awe-inspiring. When I see formations like these hidden in plain sight, the hair on the back of my neck stands up
Such a great episode. Jerome is fantastic. Love seeing this less formal, “out in the field” side of him as he follows a hypothesis and interprets on the fly. Thank you both!
Jerome is so good. Such a pro. I am always impressed and want to hear more. Keep your eye on him all you flood geologists; he will make important discoveries in his time.
Wonderful video! I have lived in Omak all my life and as I get older, I am more and more interested in the geology of my surroundings, our state and the PNW abroad. I find gratitude in finding your older videos on CWU's RU-vid and your teachings here on your personal RU-vid. Thanks to you and Jerome for igniting theories, connections and energies into this area of the world.
I love watching field geology, I get both the beautiful landscape and the cool science. Also, the little OSHA guy inside me wanted you to be wearing a safety vest when you were beside the road at the end. 😛😶
Thank you Nick for driving up to the Okanogan and capturing this visit with Jerome. I was taught that the "Okanogan Lobe" of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet came down all the way to Grand Coulee and pushed the Columbia down the Dry Falls, Lenore and Soap Lake channel? Where was the extent of the Okanogan Lobe. I see the Tunk valley as a lake that formed on the side of the Okanogan Lobe. This is water came from local creek flow but it runs into a wall of ice plugging up the Okanogan valley so it forms a lake on the side. Each of the flats in the Tunk are deltas where the sediments from the creek, meets still water forming the steep drop off common to above gradient energetic creeks. For your younger viewers, Brewster Flat (the great terrace) is where NASA established a radio listening post for communication with the Mercury and later manned space programs. When John Glenn orbited Earth in space in 1962 and then attempted reentry into the Atmosphere, a sensor went off that indicated that his heat shield might have slipped. America waited eight minutes while the Mercury Capsule, named Freedom 7, came over the Pacific from the west and dropped through the "Van Allen Belt" that inhibited radio reception. About a third of the population of Earth, listened to "Freedom 7, this is Brewster Flats, do you copy?"Over" multiple times until John Glenn answered and we knew he had not burned up as he entered the atmosphere. The heat shield sensor turned out to be faulty. Freedom 7 landed near Turk Island, in the Atlantic as planned. John Glenn went on to be the oldest astronaut to ever go into space, on the Shuttle Discovery, (1998) after retiring from the Senate at age 77. He said he was never so happy in his life to hear that call from Brewster Flats.
Thank you for reminding all of us that Washington had a part to play in our learning about space. Time blurs what we feeble humans consider “history.” While our Earth’s history is counted in millions and billions of years. We are just a blips on the last few seconds of Earth’s last minute of time. I am almost to retirement age but I keep learning things about this old world of ours and the more research I do the more rabbit holes I want to go down. But I don’t think I will have enough time to discover every thing on my list; it is now about 70’ish pages long single space typed. Oh well maybe the person getting my papers will find my list and take up the research. I can only hope. Nick you opened a new line of research for me because of geology and for that I will forever be greatful. You have brought so many learned scholars on that have pointed me to the right place at the right time. You are one of the professors who I wish had been teaching my geology class. It was so dry and boring that most of the class slept (class was at 7:30 am) and there were just a few of us taking notes. But having a majority of the class needing note’s payed for a higher standard of living for that semester.
I think i saw your Mitisbishi Van Near Enderby Last week? At Eby Hand Launch for the Shuswap river...i ve lived here since 1969, luv Nicks Vids and both ur guys expertise, im a hobby Geologist, i have some cool spots i visit often near here. Many questions unanswered about my area,( great divide, Fraser/ Columbia river systems , Enderby Cliffs, Mabel Lake Glacial Eratics etc etc )
I'm not a geologist, but I really enjoy learning about the planet via programs like this one. Thanks to your teaching Nick, I saw the "terraces" and noticed the dips in the road before you and Jerome explained them, and I guessed what the "terraces" were correctly. You taught me to look at the earth with a scientific eye/mind. Many thanks to you and Jerome, and to all the scientists past and present who have contributed to our current understanding of the Earth's processes. It is all pretty darned wonderful. Literally wonder-full.
Jerome raises lots of questions which really need to be answered by further investigations into the structure of the “flats” and other terrace like structures. No guesses as to who will be then one to watch in the future. Thanks Nick for allowing Jerome to open up about his thoughts. Great video! 🐻
I lived in that area for a number of years when I first moved out here. I never gave the landscape a thought other than it was a far cry different from the woods of upstate NY.
Wow, that was really interesting, thanks Nick and Jerome. Lidar is so cool. Even I knew immediately what those ripples were as soon as i saw the pic. it reminds me of why I enjoy B/W photography in that... when you remove the color you are more free to see the form. Lidar removes all the stuff that clutters up the picture so you can see the shape of what's really there.
What a great video , kudos Nick and Jerome. Jerome like you Nick is a great teacher and has a talent for info delivery, always very interesting/entertaining!! The lidar maps are such a treat!!
Great outing, guys! Hope you can do more! If you're near Omak, try getting out to "Balancing Rock" near Omak lake. Very cool huge erratic balancing on a smaller rock... The landscape and lidar images of the Columbia river channel from Kettle Falls to the Spokane River look a lot like what you've explored there in the Okanagan. Lots of benches full of rounded river cobble. We even have a huge gravel pit full of river cobbles on the summit of Addy-Gifford road at 2800 ft. Exciting stuff! And don't forget to check out the erratic boulder fields east of Curlew! No other site like it!
There are terraces where I live and it was very interesting to hear Jerome telling of the formation of those in WA. Ours are marine terraces formed by wave action and erosion combined with lifting of the landmass. It took me aback to think of them formed by deposition and then erosion. I'd love to have a beer around the campfire with Nick, Jerome and Skye and just listen to them talk new ideas! Thanks Nick!
Tunk creek is where my Grandpa found the Thulite I gave Nick. I think you might find more ripples in Horse Springs Coulee north of Aeneas lake by Tonasket. We found mussel shells in terraces around Tonasket, clearly the ice had melted enough to allow feed for them for a time and that the benches were probably shores of a river lake. When the ice came back it drove the river up and over the area south of Janis bridge which eroded and allowed the lake to drain? The river, for a time, looks like it followed Hwy 97 down the higher valley of Crumbacher lake prior to the drainage opened up south of Janis bridge.
The Similkameen River has always provided way more water flow than the Okanogan and it used to flow through the Spectacle lake valley. I suppose it's possible that it even went south past Blue lake into fish lake, then into either the Conconully, the Crumbacher lake area or both.
I've always thought the same. No geologist, just a local. Both those valleys (spectacle n blue) are deeper and wider than the current water could form. Some may be from flooding coming down Toats coulee, but it seems more water volume and time than Toats would provide. Similkameen is a good explanation, especially since it flows that direction through Palmer lake during flood stage.
@@thomashart1560 I thought about this a bit more and decided that the east side of the coast range Canadian cascades would have always provided way more runoff than the the inland mountains around the Okanagan, draining all the water east of the Fraiser. The square mileage of drainage would have been huge. The backed up Columbia drainage probably fed into either the Okanagan and/or the Similkameen as well adding even more water. All the benches in the US Okanogan and south down to Wenatchee could have come from the two rivers together.
Definitely a geologically diverse area. Quite familiar with Tunk Mtn area up into Aeneas Valley. Also familiar with the area due east of Riverside up Johnson Creek Rd/Riverside Cutoff Rd., where if one takes the first dirt road north (to the right) about 1 mile east of Hwy 97 is an area known as the Lime Belt where Albtight cave, situate on Cave Mtn., largest limestone cave in Washington. Personally been down to very bottom of the cave and could feel a cool breeze coming up from the progressively narrowing passage. Many people are not aware that Albright Cave has two cave entrances. Just north of Riverside, where Hwy 97 crosses the Okanogan River, a.ka., Janus Bridge, take the dirt road that goes up to McLoughlin Canyon and there is an extense cave system that i am personally quite familiar with known as McLoughlin Caves. This is one of the largest cave systems of Washington state. It is essentially a mountain that is fractured in criss-cross fashion with numerous interconnected passages with some impreesive size rooms, extremely narrow passageways that drop several hundred feet down that requires climbing gear. If you find a large manilla rope that goes down a steep passage it was left there by me and two rock climbing buddies one day back in early 1990s. See, Caves of Washington, by William R. Halliday. Albright Cave @ p. 40; McLoughlin Cave @ p. 43. ger_ic40_caves_of_wa.pdf
Can't get into edit my comment to make correction that Johnson Creek/ Riverside Cutoff Rd is not east, but west of Riverside. The Lime Belt /Cave Mtn area is also accessible by heading north up Hwy 97 about 6 mi. to South Pine Creek Rd., head towards Fish Lake.
Thanks for the rope! My buddy and I made it to a rope but didnt trust it. We brought back our own and my buddy dropped 20 feet or so and could tell it went a lot deeper. We didnt have any climbing experience so we turned back. Good times! That was 2001-2002. Amazing mountain! We heard rumor, maybe even found an old newspaper article saying another entrance across the river was dynamited. We were looking for the stash of guns hidden there by outlaws!!
Fascinating again gentlemen thank you! I look forward to more in this country. I was born just over to the east there in Colville. Spent my childhood roaming the hills of my family cattle ranch on a mountain east side of the Kettle River, just 20 miles from Lake Christina BC. I just love that country.. Now we look to the future with a video of Jerome, Skye Cooley and you Nick!
Sounds like Kelly Hill. I used to be a Beekeeper with Joe Holt in Kettle and we had bee yards all over Kelly Hill. It was my favorite place to eat lunch while working. Locations were Anderson, Madsen, Hansen, Dewey Beardsley, Koschutski, etc... Heaven on Earth.
Gifford gal, here! Been studying the features along the Columbia and they have all the same characteristics as Nick and Jerome pointed out in the Okanagan...didn't find any ripples on the lidar here though. Lots of "streamlines", especially around Hunters.
Lake Missoula was a 'perfect storm' arrangement where one of the south-moving tongues of ice (Purcell lobe) crossed and blocked a west-flowing river, (the Clark Fork of the Columbia). But you don't have that same geometry in the Okanagan/Okanogon. Here, you have south-flowing rivers, and south-flowing ice lobes. So it's hard to construct a way to have one intercept and block the other to impound a large lake which will eventually breach and contribute to the erosion seen in Washington. Perhaps a fast-moving ice tongue from a side valley blocked drainage as the main Okanagan tongue receded northwards. But 'Where's the Lake?' is my question. No remnant shorelines. No lacustrine clay, no varves. No dropstones. So we have to go with sub-glacial flow which doesn't leave much evidence. The new mega-ripples shown on Lidar are compelling...but could they have been formed by an unusually rapid period of glacial melt which filled the valley with deep runoff?
The effect of heavy snow falls during the Ice Age reached far south of the ice sheet terminations in the northern states of the lower forty-eight, producing glazier cut valleys where no glaziers have existed for thousands of years. I imagine the ice sheets, as they progressed south, over topped mountains and glazier filled valleys, filling in the valleys and then sliding over the top to fill in the next valley, and so on. As the ice sheets receded (they were still moving south, just melting back faster than their southward movement) leaving great depths of ice in those valleys. Eventually exposure of mountain peaks collecting solar heat and rising temperatures could cause melting, water ponding and cutting through mountain peaks thousands of feet above the current valley floors. Alluvial fans, bench's, flats and such could form high on the sides of a glazier filled valley.
That is a good point, heavy snowfalls may have produced local glaciers, after all a glacier apparently exists in Mt. St. Helens's crater now, it doesn't take long.
Lidar is a useful tool. I'd hoped for more about the talks with Jerome about subglacial water discharge from Canada into the US Okanogan. Here we go! Stay tuned. Thank you Nick and Jerome!
I'm always excited to learn from Jerome and happy to see him in the field! Maybe Jerome can give Nick some contacts and we'll see Nick on Kosmographia!
Nick is a whole level above Komodo’s audience which is all good. One is science the other speculation not to be confused. Guess I just like the old man back in Smyrna GA
Thanks, Nick and Jerome! Cool how clear that Lidar is! Thanks for showing us yet another weapon in our arsenal to find evidence to prove hypotheses! Will look forward to hearing where those rocks in the terraces come from!
Always love learning new thing with you professor. I'm a new viewer and really enjoying your 351 series right now. It's amazing and wish I had you as a teacher in school.
As soon as I saw the 1st lidar image i said "Whoa!!!" Imagine that boat ride. Geomorphology always reminds me how impossibly short our lives are and the power of nature & time. Thanks for bringing us out here Nick, you never fail to turn on my imagination in visualizing being there as all these events happen. I drove up hwy 97 through those ripples back in 1997 but like everyone else, I failed to notice them.
Fascinating episode showing the Geomorpholgy of the area with a view using new Remote Sensing via LIDAR. Plus the possible future hypothesis of the history, causes of past events. EXCELLENT!!!
Does Jerome really have a right-hand drive car? At first I thought you had your iphone camera settings set to 'mirror.' But the printing on the maps is not reversed.
Yes, it looks to be a RHD Japanese-market Mitsubishi Delica. Canadian import laws are a little more lax than US ones, allowing imports of foreign market cars 15+ years old while here in the states it is 25+ years old. As a result, it isn't too uncommon to see Japanese market imports in Canada since they can get somewhat newer stuff.
On a few occasions I had opportunity to drive a right-hand drive minivan from the U.K. in Norway where of course they drive on the right-hand side of the road. It was….a challenge to the brain, to say the least.
Thanks for taking us along and sharing this interview and field trip, most interesting. Surprised to see large rounded rocks in soil there. I wouldn't have guessed that to be old flood plain.
very interesting video, at 19:10 where your talking about the benches, could they be the remanence of a land slide coming down from above, where looser material was deposited from either the ice that was there, or another way, with natural erosion scattered around their bases ?
Thank you, Nick! This is timely as we are driving out of the North Cascades in four weeks and can check out the Great Terrace where the Okanogan meets the Columbia near Brewster! Always enjoy hearing Jerome’s theories. Best Wishes. Leslie from near Boston.
Thanks again Nick, you and Jerome would have blast here in Central Alberta. Starting 200 meters outside my front door. Our house sits on Moraine near a flood cut(30m) on the Red Deer River . The area here in the City has exposed sandstones ,lens of sand and silt. Kettles , Waves and Flow Channels throughout the area. I wonder if Alberta Geological Service has done any LADIR work here .
I think that fan shaped feature is an alluvial fan then another or same event came from the river channel from the left and eroded the fans edge. Maybe it is an actual glacial dam, or yokelalps type situation? I think I spelt that wrong. The Icelandic term for flood caused by volcanic activity melting a glacier.
Fascinating stuff, thanks for bringing us along! I actually spent a bunch of time listening to the video while panning around inside of Google Earth. If you set the "Elevation Exaggeration" option to "2" in Google Earth, a lot of these escarpments and flats really pop out! Pretty sure I found every spot you filmed from by matching fields, roads, and landforms in the background. ;-) Wish I could share the Google Earth spots here on RU-vid so that others could "fly" to them and view them in 3d!
Very interesting stuff! Interesting observations and questions, and as Rachel suggests below, Lidar appears to be a very useful tool. I need another lifetime to explore and understand all this…
I love these videos. I always learn so much about my home region, and I'm really grateful! Is there a difference between a bench (I live on a bench) and a terrace? Edit: After watching all of the video, I conclude they're synonymous.
At 7:54 I think Jerome is trying to describe Kame Terraces. Like a lower shelf along the side of the hillside and are pretty much equal in height from where you are standing. Sometimes there are a couple of terraces present like along US 97 and southwest of Riverside, WA. Those LIDAR landform maps are fascinating. You can see the ripples left by the water . Better than what google can show . Great information on what happened with the glaciers and meltwater floods here.
I’m really enjoying these videos lol. The rippled bench up to the 10min mark…. Looks a lot like a dirty silt free of stone, and into my mind jumps the thought that this could be the redistributed Okanagan lake or Similkameen valley glacial silt beds. In part.
The large flat thats was eroded to create that area they are standing on was created when all the material washed out of the valley that Omak lake is in and was all deposited right there during the flood. That material was pushed there with flow out of the columbia up over the omak lake valley (kartar valley). I think it was all part of the event that broke up the lower Okanogan lobe
Makes me wonder about the Gangplank north of the Denver Basin. Denver Basin cut by the South Platte and is Cache la Poudre part of the north side? Is the Gangplank an outwash terrace from the Rockies?
As always, a great video with lots of questions. I do have a few myself and perhaps you've addressed them before. On this video, at the second stop, the lidar show distinct right to left marks. I'm guessing glacial striations? (the map where you were looking at the terraces) In the third segment, you were looking down at the river. Is the valley bottom the remnants of a glacial lake or just flood plain? Lastly, I'm not sure you've mentioned it in previous videos but, here in Maine, the ocean intruded inland over 100 miles in places after the glaciers retreated and before the land rebounded. That must have happened in Washington as well? Once again, thanks for all your videos.
Your in my back yard kind of, I am in Omak, and just Off Greenacres Rd. is where you are at up by the Airport. I am presently unearthing a large gravel bar south of you guys about 4 miles on highway 20 mile marker 231 by Smallwood Farms.
