Category: collective amnesia

The Missoula Floods? The Flood of Floods

On By JohnIn collective amnesia, sociologyLeave a comment

I’ve been listening to assorted videos on the Tubes of You, and this one came up: a review of the cosmic impact, biomass burning, climate change, and megafaunal extinctions 12,800 years ago.

That piqued my interest.

I started paying a bit more attention to the video rather than the audio.

And, of course, there’s the actual published paper that you might have a read over as well. It’s long, yes, And technical. But well worth it.

I’ll have to start doing a brain dump of the details that I’ve amassed on the matter as well. In fact, here are some of the very raw notes on the video topic itself:

—

Significant primarily because it’s my back yard [I live in the area], clearly ties into the topic at hand, but this video also contains a wide aerial pan of Dry Falls [until recently, I used to fish those lakes quite regularly] (https://youtu.be/nPOlomFhehQ).

…[seeing the height of the coulee walls — about 600-800 ft — it’s] significant because it highlights the amount of rushing water needed to pulverize the basalt and granite bedrock.

The coulees themselves, I would speculate, were caused not from a series of “Missoula Floods” but from one, single, truly cataclysmic flood — The Flood of Floods — the passage of sufficient floodwater as would have been released in the primary impact event at the end of the YD epoch and that matches up with the meltwater pulses and catastrophic sea-level rise.

—

Eh, it’s something I need to wordsmith a bit.

An Alternate Interpretation

On By JohnIn collective amnesiaLeave a comment

Have you learned how to think? Or learned what to think?

To borrow a phrase, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

What would happen, if a small bit of land were inundated by water?

We see this all the time at very small scales.

Rivers, dams, coastal lagoons and beaches.

Now think of it slightly larger:

The ocean would wash across the land. Water volumes sufficient to inundate the land, would generate turbulence enough to collect up and suspend its own floor within the moving water column.

When it washes across the land, it would deposit its sediment in alluvial patterns.

The vegetation would die in short order from the salt-water poisoning. The landscape would change.

We’ve observed this in the rather small-scale localized tsunami in 2011 that struck the coast of Japan.

Now consider it occurring at a larger scale. A Pacific Arboreal forest localized on the Olympic Penninsula, for example. More energy. More water. More sediment. More mud.

How about at an even larger scale were it localized in South America? All of that dead or dying material would decay. The mud sediment would dry and in time become sand. Without water retention and a disruption of its own water cycle, it would become a desert.

Its rivers and tributaries, too, would change as a result of the mud collection.

What about at an even larger scale? Localized in Northern Africa?

With the deposit of mud and sediment, the loss of vegetation to retain water, it’s not at all unreasonable to envision that the climate and waterflow would change. Dramatically.

Sediment would be deposited in significant alluvial patterns just as we observe at much smaller scales elsewhere.

Yes, 100 years (or fewer) would seem quite plausible, and the very fabric of the land would drastically change.

It’s presently difficult for us to pin down a date with any certainty, but there is already emerging information that tends to point to a specific, cataclysmic event: 12,000 years ago.