Bill, Thanks for a most interesting email. As you pointed out, Bretz is/was a pretty famous guy among geologists for much more than his work on caves. Neat that you took the time to look him up and meet with him in person. I'm sure that he appreciated it. I think I have an original copy of his book on the Washington State Scablands somewhere. Actually, I think there may have been two bigger floods in geologic history, the flooding of the Mediterranean Sea after the Straights of Gibraltar were breached (many hundreds of thousands of year ago?) and also the flooding of the Black Sea with the Dardanelles were breached. The later one is thought by some to have been witnessed by early humans and may account for the oral tradition about a great flood, later recounted in some religious texts. I don't know about the size of the Lake Bonneville Flood from the Great Salt Lake that swept over the Snake River Plane into northern Idaho. Anyway, some of the youngsters that have had historical geology may be able to expand on that.
Geary -----Original Message----- From: Mixon Bill [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2011 9:29 PM To: Cavers Texas Subject: [Texascavers] Bretz's flood The cave connection of this second item from the "Windy City Speleonews" is just J Harlen Bretz. Yes, no period after the J, which was his full name. I had lunch with him when he was 94 at his house, Boulderstrewn, in Homewood, Illinois. I happened to drive by, on the way to the NSS convention in Bellingham, Washington, a few years ago, the Dry Falls three miles wide, where the state of Washington has a picnic area and displays. One non-technical source on the falls is http://www.gonorthwest.com/Washington/northeast/Dry_Falls.htm , although links onward from that page are broken. -- Mixon Cavers know J Harlen Bretz mainly as the author of "Caves of Missouri" and coauthor of "Caves of Illinois," which was published when he was 78 years old. To speleologists, he is best known for his famous 1942 "Journal of Geology" paper on vadose and phreatic features of caves. But his geological studies were by no means restricted to caves, and he is probably best known for (and is most proud of) of series of papers published between 1923 and 1932 in which he described the very peculiar geology of a large area in eastern Washington that he correctly attributed to a catastrophic flood. This theory was considered outrageous at the time, partly, at least, because it was a departure from the only recently ascendent geological dogma of uniformitarianism. But more recent research has fully proved him right. A lake, called Lake Missoula, was created in western Montana by a dam of glacier ice in northern Idaho. The lake contained some four hundred cubic miles of water that were released suddenly when melting caused the dam to fail. The resulting flood, called the Spokane Flood after the city presently near the upstream end, scoured nearly three thousand square miles down to bedrock and created huge canyons and cataracts, one three miles wide. It deposited gravel bars, some of which contain boulders several feet in diameter, a hundred feet high and a mile long, topped with giant current ripple-marks ten feet high. The water ponded behind the Wallula Gap, through which it poured a thousand feet deep. The peak flow from Lake Missoula, attested to by current ripples fifty feet high, has been calculated at twenty million cubic meters per second. (This is fifteen _cubic miles_ per hour. For comparison purposes, it is one hundred fifty times the mean flow of the Amazon River and ten or twenty times the total average flow of fresh water into the oceans of the world.) In a few days, it was all over. (Actually, there were a good number of such floods, as the ice dam reestablished itself. Note added 2011.) ---------------------------------------- A fearless man cannot be brave. ---------------------------------------- You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: [email protected] AMCS: [email protected] or [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
