When geologist J. Harlen Bretz proposed the idea that the rugged canyons and hills of eastern Washington did not form gradually but were carved out in days by a cataclysmic flood, his colleagues called him a quack. In 1923 everyone knew that geology is measured in millennia, not days. Huge canyons and hills simply couldn’t be created overnight. Dry Falls in eastern Washington was once the largest waterfall on Earth, four times the size of Niagara Falls. Photo credit: Canva Bretz would spend more than a decade being ridiculed for his “absurd” idea, but he was right. In fact, the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington were created by a flood. Bretz had spent years conducting field work on the ground, mapping the region’s unique topography with remarkable precision. He saw what those who had never visited the area failed to see: canals instead of valleys, dramatic erosional changes that were “nothing short of astonishing.” The only problem? I couldn’t imagine where that catastrophic flood could have come from. Explaining Washington’s Most Unexpected Landscape Most people associate Washington with evergreen forests, misty mountains and rain, but only part of the state has those characteristics. Much of eastern Washington is the exact opposite: a high, arid, sunny desert as far as the eye can see, a barren, sagebrush-covered landscape that looks nothing like Twilight or Twin Peaks. Bretz found the topography of eastern Washington fascinating. Every summer, he took his students to study the deep basalt canyons, mysteriously undulating bedrock, giant coulees, glacial irregularities, and other geological oddities that other scientists didn’t bother to examine closely. He named the region Channeled Scablands, a nod to the partially healed wounds of a great catastrophe on land. Years of detailed observation made it clear to Bretz that a flood of gigantic proportions had sculpted this land. But it took another geologist, Joseph Pardee, to find the source of the flood: glacial Lake Missoula in Montana. The massive flood that formed Channeled Scablands Montana is two states away from Washington…what magnitude are we talking about? Big. Enormous. Glacial Lake Missoula was the size of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined and was formed when the Clark Fork River receded and pooled behind a 2,000-foot-high ice dam. Near the end of the last Ice Age, that ice dam broke and the lake emptied to the west in two days. Here’s how the National Park Service describes that event: “A wall of water hundreds of feet high thundered downstream at 65 miles per hour (105 km/hour) with ten times more water than all the rivers in the world today. This massive flood of water, ice, and debris shook the ground as it rushed westward over 16,000 square miles (41,440 km2) in what is now Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.” The force of that volume of water being released all at once would be truly catastrophic. To anyone living nearby 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, it would have seemed downright apocalyptic. At first, Bretz believed that a single flood had carved this topography, but it eventually became clear that Lake Missoula actually receded and flooded several times. Bretz was vindicated and finally got his flowers at age 97. When Bretz proposed his flood theory, traditional geologists held firmly to the idea of uniformitarianism, the belief that geological formations formed over thousands or millions of years. Bretz’s proposal of catastrophism (the idea that a cataclysmic event could dramatically shape a landscape in a short period of time) was dismissed as unscientific. “Bretz became a pariah to other members of the geological community who preferred to imagine scenarios of slow, gradual change over hundreds of thousands of years, not a short-lived flood that smacked of biblical catastrophe,” Bretz biographer John Soennichsen wrote in his guide Channeled Scablands. In the end, Bretz was vindicated. Its discovery changed geology and what humanity thought was possible. However, it took until the 1970s for catastrophism to be fully accepted in the world of geology and for Bretz to be fully recognized for his contributions. In 1979, at the age of 97, Bretz received the Penrose Medal, the Geological Society of America’s highest award. Upon receiving the award he said: “Perhaps I can be credited with reviving and demystifying legendary catastrophism and challenging an overly rigorous uniformitarianism.” He also reportedly joked to his son: “All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.”
