Weinberger 1 Keely Weinberger Matthew Severs Physical Geology 30 April 2010 Glacial Lake Missoula Introduction & Brief

History Thousands of years ago, North America as we know it was a vastly different place. Most of North America and regions across the globe were covered by glaciers and ice. These glaciers ripped across landscapes eroding enormous amounts of material and carved an array of enormous geological features. During the last ice age, in the late Pleistocene Epoch, a giant ice cap amassed in present day British Colombia. This ice sheet, now referred to as the Cordilleran ice cap, is responsible for creating one of the largest natural disasters our world has ever seen. The Cordilleran ice sheet was one of two massive ice sheets that covered North America during the last ice age. Amazingly, even though the ice sheet was 4000 km wide, it was the smaller of the two ice sheets (Booth, Goetz Troost, Clague, & Waitt, 2003). Due to warmer temperatures, the southern limits of the ice sheet were more vulnerable to melting, which caused large ice lobes to form. Like fingers, these lobes reached into the continental United States forming geologic features of their own. Major ice lobes included the Puget, Okanogan, and of course the Purcell lobe. The Purcell lobe of the Cordilleran ice cap formed a 2,000 ft. tall ice dam at the Clark Fork River valley system, located in present day Idaho and Montana (Bretz, 1969). Evidently, the dam spanned approximately 30 miles from the Clark Fork River all the way to the panhandle of Idaho (Alt, 2001). Throughout the end of the Pleistocene, meltwater was being expelled from glaciers during summer melting periods, significantly raising sea level, which rose

Weinberger 2 approximately 100 ft. every 1,000 years (Alt, 2001). This glacial meltwater would also run off on land surfaces, occasionally forming large bodies of water. One of the largest meltwater bodies became Glacial Lake Missoula. Roughly 12,000 years ago, Glacial Lake Missoula was a massive inland sea the size of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined (Montana, 2005). At its largest, Glacial Lake Missoula covered about 2,900 square miles and towered 4,150 ft. above sea level (Alt, 2001). The lake reached a maximum depth of 950 ft. and held a whopping 530 cubic miles of water (Alt, 2001). Several times during the course of Lake Missoulas existence, the ice dam that impounded the lake broke under the tremendous amount of stress caused by millions of tons of water. According to Bretz (1969), the scabland topography suggests that seven huge floods could have spilled out of Lake Missoulas banks over the course of thousands of years. After each collapse, an ice dam would again form in the same region, giving rise to multiple Lake Missoulas. It was not until warming global temperatures caused massive glacial retreats that Lake Missoula was finally extinguished. Productivity During its existence, Glacial Lake Missoula was a productive system. Powdery rock flour, formed by friction in glaciated rocks, enriched the lake during summer months while glaciers were retreating (Alt, 2005). The rock flour contained copious amounts of dissolved mineral nutrients, which made Glacial Lake Missoula extremely fruitful. Primarily, the lake supported photoautotrophs, such as algae, which were valuable because they are the basis of most marine food chains. Surprisingly, no fish ever swam in Lake Missoula or at least geologists have never found fossils supporting their presence in the lake (Alt, 2005). The main reason perhaps that no fish lived in the inland sea is because heavy rock flour deposits may have proved

Weinberger 3 to be inhospitable conditions for fish species. Also, any fish that may have lived in the lake would have periodically been evacuated when the ice dams broke unleashing another Missoula flood. Powerful Missoula Floods & the Channeled Scablands The magnitude of the Missoula floods is unlike anything mankind has ever seen. Floodwaters rushed out of the lakes banks at speeds up to 50 miles an hour creating features like giant ripple marks in the Camas Prairie, colossal sand bars tens to hundreds of meters high, and the famous Channeled Scablands in Washington (Montana, 2005). Geologists have estimated that Missoula floodwaters achieved a maximum flow rate of 9.46 cubic miles per hour, or 386 million cubic feet per second (Montana, 2005). The torrents raced at a rate 60 times greater than the flow of the Amazon River, the worlds current largest river (Montana, 2005). Missoulas waters ploughed easily through four states overloading rivers, cutting through landscapes, and even draining into the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, a route 430 miles from Clark Fork River (Bretz, 1969). Astonishingly, all of the contents of Lake Missoula presumably could have drained in less than a week. With such fast moving waters, it is easy to conceive of the fact that when Missoula emptied, the waters permanently scarred landscapes in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. One of the most interesting areas scoured by Lake Missoulas waters was the Channeled Scablands in Eastern Washington State (Figure 1). J. Harlen Bretz, a rebel geologist, first recognized that these scablands must have been created by a catastrophic event, a massive flood (Soennichsen, 2008). Conducting many of his studies in the early part of the twentieth century, his ideas were ridiculed by his colleagues, for most geologists of the day were Uniformitarians. They believed that the scablands were built gradually over time and related

Weinberger 4 scabland formation to that of the gradual sculpting of the Grand Canyon by the Colorado River. They argued that large geomorphic features were formed from gradual processes and were not the result of some catastrophic event. Additionally, Bretz devised his cataclysmic flood hypothesis without actually defining the source of the floodwaters, and he had never thought about the possibility of the emptying of a glacial lake. Without proof of the mechanism driving his hypothesis, Bretz was not taken seriously by other geologists. Despite the disapproval of his colleagues, Bretz did not back down, knowing that the immense features of the scablands would have taken copious amounts of force and energy. Bretz described his first view of the scablands, No one with an eye for landforms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the scabland. Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face of the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, or nearly bare, black rock craved into mazes of buttes and canyonsThe scablands are wounds only partially healedgreat wounds in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock. (Soennichsen, 2008) Analyzing Varves, Rhythmic Beds, & Geomorphic Features The scablands were not the only notable geologic features left behind from Missoulas waters. Another well know geologist, J.T. Pardee, was one of the first geologists to recognize the Missoula Valley that contained Glacial Lake Missoula. In his first publication on Glacial Lake Missoula, he noted trails that he recognized as ancient shorelines (Pardee, 1910). In his work, he mentioned that, in the Missoula and Bitter Root valleys on the mountain sides and along the foothills are level lines or small terraces, evidently lines, formed by the dashing of the waves. (Pardee, 1910). These bedded glaciolacustrine sand, silt, and clay sequences are still being studied by current geologists and are referred to as the Ninemile section (Smith, 2006).

Weinberger 5 These lines are evident on Mt. Jumbo (Figure 2), the top of which would have literally been an island when Lake Missoula filled the valley. Supporting Pardees hypothesis that the valleys once contained an ancient glacial lake, the slopes of the Bitter Root Valley and the Lo-Lo Fork had varves matching those on Mt. Jumbos slopes. The ancient shoreline varves also give light to the fact that the water levels in Glacial Lake Missoula were not constant. In fact, the sediment deposits suggest that there were several instances when Glacial Lake Missoulas ice dam broke, raping landscapes of their preflood loessial cover and shaping the mysterious Upper Grand Coulee (Bretz, 1969). Estimates of how many times Glacial Lake Missoula emptied range significantly from as low as 7 times to as high as 100 times (Bretz, 1969; Swanson & Haugerud, 1994). Each time Missoula let its waters loose, sediments were up-heaved and deposited elsewhere. For years, geologists have tried to solve the conundrum of how many flood events were induced by Glacial Lake Missoula. Geologists like Bretz used sediment deposits as well as geomorphic features to approximate how many floods occurred during the last ice age. Other geologists approximated the amount of floods by analyzing varves on hillsides. A geologist by the name of Richard Waitt utilized the rhythmic beds of sediment (Figure 4) found in the Walla Walla valley to make his educated guess on the matter. He hypothesized that each layer of sediment deposits represented a different flood event. In his studies on the graded beds, he found 13,100-yr-BP ash deposits from a volcanic event of Mount St. Helens (Swanson & Haugerud, 1994). These deposits matched other graded beds from the Columbia River basin, suggesting that Missoula emptied at least 100 times (Swanson & Haugerud, 1994).

Weinberger 6 Floodwater Pathways & Flood-Induced Features Every time Missoulas ice dam ruptured, it released a wall of water into the nearby Rathdrum Prairie, the Spokane Valley, and the Spokane River basin. At one time, these areas contained Glacial Lake Columbia, another glacial lake impounded by lobes of the Cordilleran ice sheet. Interestingly, Glacial Lake Columbia, being 2,400 ft. above sea level, probably flooded Rathdrum to within a few miles of the Clark Fork dam, which impounded Glacial Lake Missoula (Alt, 2001). According to Waitts studies, Glacial Lake Columbia was present at different depths or not at all during the many flood events of Lake Missoula (Swanson & Haugerud, 1994). Regardless of the presence of Glacial Lake Columbia, the floodwaters continued on their destructive path, creating scablands on the basaltic substrate in eastern Washington. Water rushed over the scablands in a wide flood, occasionally even traveling upslope due to the high velocity that the waters were traveling. Alt jokingly remarked about the rush of water over the scablands, Water suddenly filled the broad valleys much faster than the streams could drain themThe bottom definitely fell out of the bathtub (Alt, 2001). However, the speed at which Missoulas waters traveled was no joke. The floodwaters continued past the scablands, carrying copious amounts of sediments and carving dozens of pathways that eventually entered the Columbia River plateau. Waters from the north entered the plateau through the Quincy Basin, while waters from the east entered through the Pasco Basin. Once the floodwaters reached the Columbia River plateau, however, the movement of water came to a screeching halt. The Columbia River channel, built on basaltic anticlines from lava flows during the Miocene, had already sculpted its own geologic features before Lake Missoula ever bombarded it with water. One such feature was the Wallula Gap in Washington. The Wallula Gap is significant because there was a relatively small space between the walls of the gap for the

Weinberger 7 Columbia River to pass through let alone the wall of Missoula floodwaters. When Lake Missoulas floodwater reached the Wallula Gap on its course toward the ocean, the flow bottlenecked leaving a large body of water constricted behind the gap. For short periods of time when Missoulas dams broke unleashing millions of tons of water, the bottlenecked floodwaters became a temporary lake, Lake Lewis. Lake Lewis, named after Meriwether Lewis, was first described by W.T. Symons in 1882 in a geologic study of the Columbia Plateau (Alt, 2001). Symons and other early geologists erroneously deduced that Lake Lewis was a lake that existed millions of years ago and actually shaped features like the Wallula Gap as a drainage pathway. It was not until more recently that geologists realized that the lake was formed only temporarily during the Missoula floods and drained rather slowly through the gap. At its fullest, Lake Lewis spanned 2,000 square miles filling up the Quincy Basin, the Pasco Basin, the Yakima Valley, and the Walla Walla Valley (Alt, 2001). For several weeks, as much as 200 cubic miles of water per day were delivered to a gap that could discharge less than 40 cubic miles per day (Topinka, 2002). Although the Missoula floods only sustained the formation of Lake Lewis for a few weeks after each flood event, the landscapes will forever be changed by its repeated formation. Lake Lewis was not the only temporary lake that formed during Missoula floods. After water trickled through the Wallula Gap, they were led into yet another holding tank, Lake Condon. Lake Condon was slightly smaller than Lake Lewis, being approximately 1,500 square miles (Alt, 2001). Waters draining from Lake Condon meandered further along the Columbia River basin until they reached yet another tight squeeze, in the words of David Alt (Alt, 2001). The tight squeeze, the Columbia Gorge, was actually the dominant control of the backups in both Lake Condon and Lake Lewis. The water flow through the andesitic gorge was at most

Weinberger 8 1.66 cubic miles per hour during the beginning of more substantial flood events (Alt, 2001). The greatest floods were about 1,000 feet deep [in the Columbia Gorge], [and] about 500 feet deep as they poured out of the western end of the gorge into the Portland Valley (Alt, 2001). The obvious next stop for floodwaters was the Portland and Willamette Valleys. Evidence of the Missoulas waters was left on the floor of the Willamette Valley, where there are layered sediment deposits, the Willamette silts. These silts were relocated from the CheneyPalouse scablands, at least a hundred miles away. Erratic rocks made of foreign materials also provide evidence of the flood. The erratics, originating at least 500 miles from the Willamette Valley, are angular rocks indicating that they were floated in icebergs by Missoula flooding (Alt, 2001). The erratics are not the only entity that traveled hundreds of miles; at this point, the worlds largest flood was closing in on its last lap (Alt, 2001). The floods long journey (Figure 4) essentially came to an end after they flooded the Portland and Willamette Valleys. They made their way into the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, the final hurrah. After some 430 miles or more, Missoulas waters finally ended their long and damaging journey into, appropriately, the worlds largest ocean.

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Figure 1: Channeled Scablands, Washington. These lands were scoured by the high-energy waters eroding away almost all of the sediments and exposing vast sectors of bare bedrock. Picture retrieved April 23, 2010 from http://hugefloods.com/Drumheller_Channels.jpg

Figure 2: Mount Jumbo, Washington. Bedded glaciolacustrine sand, silt, and clay sequences show evidence of ancient shorelines. Picture retrieved April 23, 2010 from http://www.historicmissoula. org/Portals/hm/MS1.jpg

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Figure 3: Rhythmic beds on the walls of the Walla Walla valley. Waitt hypothesized that each layer of sediment represented a different Missoula flood event. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Touchet_Formation

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Legend
Cordilleran Ice Sheet Maximum extent of Glacial Lake Missoula (eastern) and Glacial Lake Columbia (western) Areas swept by Missoula and Columbia floods

Figure 4: Aerial Map of Glacial Lake Missoula, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, and areas affected by Missoula flooding. Retrieved April 24, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_missoula_floods.gif

Weinberger 12 Literature Cited Alt, D.D. (2001). Glacial Lake Missoula and its humongous floods. Mountain Press Publishing Company, Montana, pg. 9, 11, 25, 87,143, 151, 154, 173 Alt, D.D. (2005). Ice Age Lake. Retrieved April 20, 2010 Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/nova/maga flood/lake.html Booth, D.B., Goetz Troost, K., Clague, J.J., and Waitt, R.B. (2003). The Cordilleran Ice Sheet. In The Quaternary Period in the United States, Developments in Quaternary Science Volume 1, eds. A.R. Gillespie, S.C. Porter, and B.F. Atwater, Elsevier, 17-43. Bretz, J.H. (1969). The Lake Missoula floods and the channeled scabland. The Journal of Geology, 77(5): 505-543 Montana Natural History Center staff. (2005). Glacial Lake Missoula and the ice floods. Retrieved April 15, 2010 from http://www.glaciallakemissoula.org/ Pardee, J.T. (1910). The Glacial Lake Missoula. The Journal of Geology, 18(4): 376-386 Smith, L.N. (2006). Stratigraphic evidence for multiple drainings of glacial Lake Missoula along the Clark Fork River, Montana, USA. Quaternary Research, 66(2): 311322 Soennichsen, J.R. (2008). Bretzs flood: the remarkable story of a rebel geologist and the worlds greatest flood. Sasquatch Books, United States, pg. xi Swanson, D.A. & Haugerud, R.A. (1994). Geologic Field Trips in the Pacific Northwest: 1994 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting Field Guides. GSA, Boulder, CO., n.p. Topinka, L. (2002). Description: Glacial Lake Missoula and the Missoula floods. Retrieved April 24, 2010 from http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/Glaciers/IceSheets/description _lake_missoula.html