I feel quite illuminated particularly from the discussion on Martian mega floods, the secrecy of the Dover channel, Gibraltar and world wide distribution of megafloods and, oh heck, Vic's whole presentation. Loved the humorous inclusion of the nature lover center folds.
Thanks for that global context, it really is required when thinking about these events. I love Vic's person floating in the black sidebar, everyone should do that!
Was pondering ice rafted erratics. How do you get a Boulder on top? Does it have to be on top? Probably not. Glaciers seem to pick up and transport mostly from bottom.?. Was watching a calving video and many turn upside down after breakup? Could that help with the equation? They started on bottom until they were floated?
This organisation SERIOUSLY needs to improve its handling of the idiots who will not mute whilst the presentation is being delivered. What happened to Baker at the start smacks of utter incompetence by the organisers. There are tools available to forcibly mute everyone in situations like that. USE THEM!
When you observe the landscape of the Central Wa. study areas and see vast stretches of relatively flat terrain surrounding ridgelines and high points, how did the terrain differ in topographical relief preglacial-flood to what is observed today? All of the incised, scoured and moved rock had to have been transported distances relative to their mass, some not very far and filled preglacial-flood canyons creating the vast flat basins observed today. Considering the depth of the deposits, how much greater was the scale of these great floods? I'm in the Willamette Valley, which is 400 miles from the Pleistocene Okanogan and 500 miles from the Purcell lobes; it has hundreds of feet of glacial flood sediments and is flat for 30 x 120 miles. Considering it's a sump for every large glacial flood that has occurred, what was the terrain here like before the glacial floods? The Willamette Valley is a forearc basin formed @40MA after the Siletz Terrane collision, so it was a sump for the Western Cascade volcanic arc flows @40-20MA and for the Columbia flood basalt flows as well, which depressed the floor and widened the basin even more @16MA. I haven't seen core sample data of the Willamette Valley, but if I were to guess per the depressional subsidence of the Coast and Western Cascade ranges toward the Valley, and inferred their angles to a convergent line in the center of the valley, the CFBs are @5,000' deep x 20 miles wide x 100 miles long, Eugene to Battle Ground WA., with 500-1,000' of Pleistocene sediments above it. The preglacial-flood Columbia channel below the Willamette river confluence must have been a deep canyon, 300-350' lower than present on CFB bedrock. If you have an interest in any of the preglacial-flood areas of the PNW, what do you think about any of these speculations or other preglacial-flood areas you may know?
I think I've read somewhere that the Biblical great flood was related to the Black sea getting filled from the Mediterranean. Was this possible, or was the Black sea filled from the NE from the glaciers? Also at 32:32 I think you mean "the separation of Europe from England" instead of France. Fascinating lecture, Thanks.
See Land of Chem for a little taste of the past. PS No evidence for megafloods is seen in the Nile Valley but anomalous heavy metal deposits in the Delta are found at 14 ka.
Not Ice Ages. There are simple answers to Earth's accumulation of water, and other resources, but Ice Ages don't enter into it. You cannot look at the past, and assume everything here today was in place then. It's illogical, and unsupported by facts. At some point in the not too distant past, one of the poles was located in the Gulf of Alaska, near the bend in the continental shelf, diametrically opposite to the old polar location 1,500 miles east of Tierra del Fuego, in that whoop-ti-do where South America stretches down to Antarctica. "Floods" are a different story, caused by the shifts I mentioned, and by the massive amount of water deposited on our planet beginning with Noah/Gilgamesh, continuing through the Fall of Empires, more than a millennium later. Gravel is the first of sediments to fall out, and repeated crossings would build up gravel, before depositing lighter "silt" over it. We see gravel under layers of silted mud, in a lot of places. Most geologists agree a water course traveled from the (current location of the) Arctic Ocean, southeasterly across the central US, emptying into what I suspect was the mid-Atlantic (although the Atlantic was still a proto-ocean at the time). Earth has NOT "always been the way it is today", and the changes are not that distant. The mountain ranges are nowhere near as old as many claim, and I am certain no one alive today would recognize the planet only 100,000 years ago, much less "millions of years ago", so commonly used, y'all abbreviate it "mya". I wish there were a time machine to verify my version, but I believe the Earth itself testifies to the fact. What could have caused the flood that "inundated the interior valleys to a depth that took 30 years to drain off"? Probably nothing short of something doing what Joshua claimed, ignoring all religious trappings. If the Earth had been stopped, the ocean water would have kept moving, pushing the Pacific Plate into South America, then sending a massive tsunami racing (at 400+ mph!) eastward, toward China. The poles were shifted seven times in ancient eras, according to pottery shards. Pottery adopts the magnetic signature of the Earth, in the transformation from wet clay. Archaeologists have known this for a century or more, but geologists are slow to come around. Your map shows what I talk and write about, events that happened less than 5,000 years ago, not mya. Events that scarred the psyches of the human survivors, leaving us with xenophobia, trust issues, and fears by the boatload. The events were off the charts, probably wiping out 90% of all life (the bones of countless animals, many who didn't belong there, were discovered in Alaska, jumbled, as if tossed pell-mell into the canyons of the coastline). The offshore scarring is more common than you suggest, appearing in the Gulf of Baja California, from the run-off of the event that "carved" the American West. More scarring is seen off the continental shelves around the world.. Turkey was overwashed by massive amounts of water, the Bosporus/Dardenalles an artifact of its passage. You talk about the distant past, showing a modern map, but the continents, except Africa, were displaced, shaped, and remodeled by water. A huge water course ran across Libya, to empty into the Gulf of Guiana, and another crossed Algeria, emptying near the Verde Islands. Then, too, we're told, "There are none so blind as those who will not see", as if the early authors of the Old Testament knew the character of humans of the future. You were taught much of this, by people who firmly believed it, and you are caught in the trap common to sons, living out the sins of their fathers. Sea levels rose when more water was added to the mix. It was a chemical reaction, nothing more mysterious, or magical!