A Mystery Solved
The biblical story of Noah being rescued in an Ark from a massive flood is well known, but there are tales of numerous similar disastrous floods in the legends of hundreds of people groups located throughout the world. The following story was passed down through ancestors of the Yakima Indians living in south-central Washington.
“In early times, many people had gone to war with other tribes; even medicine men had killed people. But there were still some good people. One of the good men heard from the Land Above that a big water was coming. He told the other good people, and they decided that they would make a dugout boat from the largest cedar they could find. Soon after the canoe was finished, the flood came, filling the valleys and covering the mountains. The bad people were drowned; the good people were saved in the boat. We don’t know how long the flood stayed. The canoe came down where it was built and can still be seen on the east side of Toppenish Ridge. The Earth will be destroyed by another flood if people do wrong a second time. (credit Ella E. Clark “Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest” U. of CA Press 1953)
Toppenish Ridge, Washington (credit YouTube)
Dr. Harlen Bretz, a professor of geology at the University of Washington, took his students on a field trip to central Washington in 1920. Their first stop was a large open field, the Ephrata Fan, near the town of Ephrata littered with boulders as large as a dump truck. The boulders were of two different compositions: black volcanic basalt lava and lite tan igneous granite. Although basalt lava flows were nearby, the closest source of granite was over 50 miles to the northeast. Bretz also noted that there seemed to be no obvious mechanism to transport them here; the ice-age glaciers had not advanced this far south, and there was no river through this valley. What is more, the boulders were stacked up in this field to a depth of 200 feet. How did they get here? A mystery.
Ephrata Fan Boulder Field (credit Pinterest)
They drove 15 miles north to their second stop. Before them was a 3 ½ mile gaping-wide panorama of 400-foot high lava-capped cliffs towering above interconnected lakes. What might have created such a feature; they had no clue? So, Professor Bretz hiked the group up the canyon all the way to the top of the cliffs. The valley below was littered with potholes, some 100 feet wide and 50 feet deep, carved into solid bedrock. They continued north of the cliffs another mile; all they saw was bare rock, not an inch of soil to be found or even a stream to erode the soil away. Very strange indeed!
Dry Falls (credit angelfire)
Dr. Bretz instructed the students that this geologic feature has all the characteristics of what was once an ancient, gigantic waterfalls. He compared these dry falls to something familiar to all, Niagara Falls. Cliff height: Niagara Falls 188 feet – Dry Falls 400 feet; end-to-end length: Niagara Falls ¾ mile – Dry Falls 31/2 miles. Surly it would take a major river to carve Dry Falls, but the nearest river, the Columbia River, is 30 miles to the northeast and it is flowing in the opposite direction. Yet another mystery.
Dry Falls [Looking South] (credit Pinterest)
The group continued northward to the Columbia River, then followed it upstream a distance before making their third stop. The landscape before them was a roller-coaster of evenly spaced concentric hills and valleys with the appearance of massive waves on the ocean – except these waves were solid earth 50 feet high. When the professor asked the students what these undulating hills reminded them of, they agreed that they had the appearance of ripple marks, caused by rapidly moving water, observed in the sand beds of the Columbia River. But those ripples were maximum a few inches high, not 50 feet! Dr. Bretz agreed with them. But what freak force of nature could account for mega-ripples like these? The mystery only deepened.
Mega-ripples by the Columbia River (credit Pinterest)
In the late 1800s and early 1900s nearly all geologists had adopted a uniformitarian philosophy: “the present is the key to the past”. This seemed to be in direct opposition to (young earth) catastrophism, the idea that most geologic features could be attributed to a catastrophic global flood of Noah’s time. Clearly geologists were moving away from religion-supported catastrophism to a more secular (old earth) uniformitarianism stance. Prior to Dr. Bretz, geologists from around the world had come to Washington to study these geologic anomalies. None were able to come up with a satisfactory uniformitarian model. Because professor Bretz had delivered lectures proposing a model based on catastrophism, he was labeled a heretic in the geologic college.
Bretz believed he had discovered overwhelming evidence that the boulder beds, dry waterfalls, and mega-ripples were caused by a catastrophic mega-flood. He calculated a wall of water miles wide, a thousand feet high, moving at 85 miles per hour – but what and where was the source?
Ancient Glacial Lake Missoula and Scablands (credit Pinterest)
Fortunately, Dr. Bretz met another geologist, Joe Pardee, at a conference. Pardee presented a research paper on ancient glacial Lake Missoula; remnants of Lake Missoula today are Flathead Lake in Montana and Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. Pardee reported that a 2500 foot thick southern spur of the massive Cordilleran glacier had blocked Lake Missoula’s only outlet, the Clark Fork River near Sandpoint, Idaho. A lake formed behind this ice dam; this lake – Lake Missoula – back-filled the mountain valleys to a depth of 2000 feet, extending for hundreds of miles, a lake containing more water than Lakes Erie and Ontario combined! Pardee postulated that once Lake Missoula reached 2000 feet, the water pressure was sufficient to “float” the blocking ice dam. When the ice dam failed, the entire lake would drain in less than a week, releasing 10 cubic miles per hour of flood waters to points west.
Pardee stated he had indisputable proof that in a period 12,700 to 15,300 years ago, Lake Missoula had filled and emptied over 100 times; once the lake had drained, glacial ice would advance and block off the river, starting a new cycle of flooding. Bretz finally had his “smoking gun”, a nearby source of water large enough and a means to release the flood waters. The mystery was finally solved!
Simulation of the Dry Falls Flood (credit National Parks Traveler)
Scablands is the name given to the thousands of square miles of topography in central Washington affected by the Lake Missoula floods. Once geologists understood the mechanism of flooding caused by failed glacier dams, they looked for similar evidence around the world. For example, the English Channel between England and France was carved out by periodic massive glacial floods.
As I reported in an earlier blog, BERINGIA, the Clovis culture (Native American Indians), after ice-age glaciers had sufficiently melted, had migrated southward from the Bering Straits (Alaska) through Canada and settled in central Washington around 14,000 years ago. These people would likely have experienced Lake Missoula floods firsthand, passing the legend through the ages to the Yakima Tribe of today. As the Yakima legend goes, when the flood arrived, water filled the valleys and flowed over the tops of nearby hills, wiping out all life and transforming the landscape. Only the forewarned “good people” protected inside a giant canoe were spared.
The account in Genesis of Noah’s Flood contains certain themes, e.g., good verses evil, a higher power warning a good person to build a large boat, a massive flood destroying an evil civilization, flood waters filling the valleys and overflowing the mountains, and a bird being sent forth to confirm the end of the flood. These same themes are common in hundreds of the reported legends. Many Christians have proposed linking these legends to confirm Noah’s Flood, but science does not support that hypothesis. Each flood account is represented by a unique cause and time frame, often differing from Noah’s story.
Epilogue
Mystery #1 – the field of boulders
The power of a wall of water tens of miles wide, up to 1000 feet high, and moving at 80 miles per hour literally ripped solid rock from the earth in huge chunks, transported it tens of miles downstream, and deposited the boulders into fields like the Ephrata Fan. Case-in-point are the large granite boulders displaced over 50 miles from their source origin.
Mystery #2 Dry Falls and giant potholes
Once flood waters were released from Lake Missoula, they generally followed the course of the Columbia River. Near the Grand Coulee Dam the Columbia River turns northward. But momentum of the flood turned southward, travelling uphill while carving a new river channel. Just as Niagara Falls has been carving out cliffs as it progresses from Lake Ontario toward Lake Erie, the same occurred at Dry Falls, but with much greater force of water and over a shorter time frame. The potholes are the result of enormous whirlpool suction at the base of the falls, like the deep depression beneath the Niagara Whirlpool.
Mystery #3 Mega-ripples
Mega-ripples like the example in this blog have been mapped over a large region of central Washington, giving it the name “scablands”. Similar features can be found as far away as the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where geologists estimate floodwaters diverted southward from the Columbia River near Portland as backwaters, filling the 150-mile long Willamette Valley to a depth of 400 feet.
