Oregon's own miniature Dry Falls! This is such a great video to show the scale of these events. Bruce, you do amazing work and present it in an enjoyable, easy to understand format. You are the J Harlan Bretz of the 21'st century!
Awesome... When I have driven along the Columbia I always look for the impact of the Great Floods but I never saw this canyon as within the total scheme of things, it is a minor remnant, but not really. It and most importantly the drone video advent allows for an effective way to present the scope and magnitude of the floods... You can almost visualize the water on the land and its movement. I have ice melting on my driveway right now and trying to go into the garage. I took a torch and cut through the ice to make channels so it drains from the "pool" on the driveway that feeds the garage invasion... Water will have its way finding the lowest point relentlessly. After torching channels, when the temp reached mid to upper 40's with direct sun yesterday you could watch the water cutting through the ice on its way to the front yard. Flow rate determined channel characteristics. You basically have a level amount with the flow seen by ripples on top of the flow but at the bottom, it is cutting channels. As the water hit the yard, the downslope increased the rate of flow creating a larger channel that resembled a miniature coulee a few inches deep and maybe six inches wide...cutting through the ice along the edge of a "ridge" of ice thrown out by the snow blower. That could be a dynamic almost be like a glacial lobe with the "coulee" running along the edge cutting down as the water sped up but couldn't cut through the trench of ice. It reached a point where it spread out across the ice on the yard and resembled channeled scablands. I even have a "recessional cataract" at one point in the yard as the speed picked up before spreading out... I'm a lost creature seeing all that in the water flowing through the yard from a partially flooded driveway... I'm retired and have to find my jollies where I can so give me a break please. But once again, I will be visiting the area out there this year and visualizing it at the macro levels of the great Lake Missoula floods.
These are amazing! Can you do one about John Day area as well? I'd love to know how that formed with the floods, as well as up further where the painted hills are.
Wow! Thank you for capturing the scale of this so marvelously! It's difficult to understand just how massive that all is if one has never seen it irl. Your dramatic camerawork captures it perfectly, expecially that last vertigo-inducing dive! FYI, Nick Zentner sent me to your channel. ☺
Wow! Fascinating series! Watched them all - one after the other. While driving through eastern Washington I've often wondered how the awesome scenery I was enjoying was formed. I now have some context and I'll never view the cliffs, gorges and valleys the same. I think there may be a hidden geologist in me... Thank you. Bob
Well, that was truly fascinating. I really appreciated the interpretation, as I never would have understood those formations otherwise. Having said that, once I knew how it happened, I could imagine it taking place. It would have been absolutely amazing, and probably terrifying as well to witness it.
This is great, every time I drive the gorge some of the names of the road signs stock with me for some reason, like Phillipi Canyon, I have absolutely no idea why but i searches it on youtube and found this.. Now I want to go explore it
Rowena Gap is what's known as a water gap. This is not because the river is older than the mountains as some geologists wrongly suppose. But rather, the water overtopped the mountain ridge and cut down into it meaning that the whole land behind it at that original altitude was flooded. Obviously the flood waters cutting down into it to make the gap provided a way to drain it. BUT! the map is very incomplete and thus misleading- Note that Rock Creek in the upper right quadrant at the 1:40 mark in the video on the north side of the Columbia also cuts through a ridge. Water does not flow uphill, nor is little Rock Creek older than those mountains. But it too is a water gap by the same means, which is that the flood overtopped that ridge north of the canyon also so that the water drained by cutting down through that rock to get to the water level today. The map needs to show all that area north of the ridge on the north side of the Columbia flooded. Then you will realize why all those wind gaps and tears and raggedness are clearly seen along that whole ridge today. Moreover, you say that the ridge of basalt called the Nook was too high for the flood to cross over the top of. But as you show aerial footage at the 4:31 mark, there on the right along the top of the ridge are long undulating gentle flood ripples. Better still, on the lower left of that scene in the video are thin water cut benches faintly seen just below the edge of the terrace showing the water was draining right up to the top of the Nook ridge.
None of what you say makes any geologic sense to me. The Columbia River has been at its present level for a million years or more, before there were any megafloods. What you're calling giant current ripples are regular, dendritic, stream channels cut into sediment cover along the Nook.
@@bjornstad51 The Columbia river was catastrophically cut by flood waters. How does it flow right through and across igneous ridges from one side to the other? Surely the igneous ridge was there before the river. One of your own videos (Drumheller Channels II) states "As recently as 14,000 years ago the mighty Columbia River once flowed here." So how could it have been "at its present level for a million years - before there were any mega floods", as you put it? Surely the river cut through old basalt in that area during the flood and thus was part of the flood. The fact that it is not there anymore shows that its current course is different since then. Thus the Columbia River itself was formed by and determined by a flood. What can be shown in that area can be shown in others.
This had to be taped after a rain or during spring time because during the summer the only green would be irrigated Fields’s. All else would be different shades of grey and brown.
