A Flood of Ages

"Events that changed our world once and for all

We often think that the history of our planet consists of painfully long and slow changes. But this isn't the case at all. Sudden and catastrophic events have occurred on Earth that have changed our world once and for all. One of these events was the great flood in North America. Let's find out what happened there.

It all started in the state of Montana, in the beautiful river valley called Missoula. Now it is a small town full of people, but tens of thousands of years ago there was something very different in this place. It was a huge lake that formed inside a melting glacier. It was called Missoula Lake and it was huge. The tops of the local hills were its high water marks. If one had stood in this place 14,000 to 18,000 years ago, all the surrounding hills would have been its shores, and the peaks themselves would have looked like small islands with nothing beneath them but the dark depths, which in some places were as deep as 2,000 feet. It was an inland sea, almost unconnected with the ocean, full of fresh water and with more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.

But where did this huge glacier come from in the first place? In fact, there has been more than one ice age on Earth in the last 100,000 years. Several times ice sheets covered the Northern Hemisphere, then melted and retreated. Our planet has been subject to many climate changes, and this was one of them. During the last ice age, the ice spread from Alaska down to the U.S.-Canadian border and affected many places, including the Missoula Valley.

The lake was surrounded by huge ice walls, and we aren't talking about big icebergs here. These walls were really huge, reaching heights of up to 2,000 feet and widths of up to 30 miles. They blocked the lake and formed something like an ice dam. As with any other dam, water gradually accumulated there from various sources, including melting glaciers, rainfall, and rivers. As a result, the lake reached a volume of about 3,000 cubic miles. Of course, things couldn't go smoothly. Not surprisingly, ice isn't the most durable material, especially when thousands of tons of water press on it. A few cracks, a few holes, and one day the dam broke.

It's scary to even imagine. Suddenly, in just a few minutes, the icy walls completely collapsed under their own weight. The bang was so loud that it could probably be heard throughout the Northwest, startling animals and sending them fleeing. And just like that, the dam was gone. Of course, the lake erupted, and the resulting stream was ten times longer than all the rivers on earth combined. It raced through several states at a speed of about 80 kilometers per hour. Because of this rapid flow, it took only a few days for the lake to completely empty. At the same time, this event caused the largest and most destructive flood in the history of our planet. It was so catastrophic that we can still see the consequences of this event in the valleys.

The flood caused large-scale erosion, that is, the destruction of rocks and soil by water and other natural processes. It's the cause of the formation of canyons, crevasses and river valleys. So this river washed away a large amount of sand, salt, gravel and even some boulders. It left behind deep, dug canyons, channels and furrows. You can roughly imagine the horrible scale of this event by looking at the cliff called Dry Falls. It's a 3.5-mile long, rugged structure in the Scablands of central Washington. It looks like this deep gorge was carved for more than a millennium, but in reality it formed incredibly quickly, as the most powerful waterfall in Earth's history poured down there. It was five times the size of the world's most famous waterfall, Niagara Falls. In some places the water was 100 feet deep and cascaded down, destroying rocks and earth along the way and forming this huge cliff.

But even with all the power of the flood, it's quite strange that it changed the landscape so much in just a few days. Normally, something like this takes thousands or even millions of years. So how could it have happened? This flood wasn't the first natural disaster here. Long before the Ice Age, about 15 million years ago, something else happened in this region — a huge lava flow. At that time, huge volcanic eruptions rocked this area, and a huge lava flow, up to 2,000 feet deep, flowed in this direction. Some time after the eruption, the lava began to cool and turned into basalt. Hundreds of years passed, and the more it cooled, the more it shrank due to the enormous pressure, slowly collapsing and breaking into fragments.

So by the time our flood came here, this valley was already pretty battered. So it was basically a piece of cake for a huge tsunami to destroy everything around. Gradually, the Missoula flood dried up and flowed toward the Pacific Ocean. That's why today we find some sediments and rocks from Montana, Idaho and Washington in this region.

The strange thing is that all this happened more than once. Scientists suggest that such an ice dam could form, melt, and re-form as many as 25 times over the centuries. And yes, each time there were crazy floods. Besides, all of these events were not that long ago. Native Americans were already living in the area at the time of these floods, so they must have been affected by them. The local tribes even had legends about the floods. For example, the Poor waterfall. According to some legends, there five giants chased a huge beaver, and the beaver managed to avoid them in the gorge of the Poor River. But they pierced him with a spear near the present waterfall. The beaver began to scratch the gorge with its claws, leaving these furrows everywhere. Now we know that this didn't really happen. These furrows were actually caused by various floods.

But even the scientists themselves have only recently learned the truth. In the 1920s, geologist J. Harlen Bretz first theorized about this flood. However, he wasn't taken seriously by other scientists who believed in the idea with the complicated name "uniformitarianism." It said that the Earth had always changed slowly and gradually. For some reason, geologists of the past believed that rapid and catastrophic changes on our planet were impossible. Unfortunately, despite a lot of evidence, Other geologists dismissed Bretz's theory since he was unable to identify the flood's source.

The geological world was entirely flipped upside down by this finding. All of the researchers' theories regarding Earth's past had to be reevaluated. It also served as the foundation for the concept of catastrophe. According to this novel theory, sudden, abrupt, and catastrophic events have definitely happened throughout Earth's history. For instance, the creation of the Moon as a result of Earth colliding with another minor planet or the extinction of the dinosaurs due to an asteroid impact. All of these things, in fact.