The Spokane Flood
In 1909, a teacher was so captivated by the riddle behind the Channeled Scablands’ formation that he became a geologist. Located in Washington State, it includes a dry waterfall 10 times bigger than Niagara Falls. Harley Bretz studied gravel heaps as high as skyscrapers, holes in which neighbourhoods could disappear, boulders in strange places, canyons not carved by rivers, and waterfalls without water sources.
His suspicions about an Ice Age mega-flood made him a leper among his peers. They could not accept that a flood shaped the land within days when accepted wisdom stated that geological changes happen slowly. They dismissed Bretz’s “Spokane Flood” in favour of processes that take millions of years.
Regrettably, Bretz could not answer where the flood originated. In the 1940s, another geologist found it. The Clark Fork River Valley was blocked during the last Ice Age, and when the dam broke, it released an unthinkable amount of water into Washington. Further research found the process repeated almost 80 times over millennia, which proved correct both Bretz and those opposing his estimate of the speed of the Scablands’ birth.
