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Missoula Floods
- sethammons 8y agoI first learned about these floods at the natural history museum in Missoula just last month. Biblical in proportion. Giant glacial dams letting loose and sending out an order of magnitude more water than the amazon basin at speeds of around 80mph, relocating 50 cubic miles of land. Amazing.
- marssaxman 8y agoI learned about the floods at Dry Falls, in central Washington, where you can look out the window of the little visitor center and see the cliff formed by the largest waterfall known to have existed in all of Earth's history. It was an amazing sight, and the whole landscape I had been driving through all day suddenly popped together in a new way. I've been back through the scablands many times since, both hiking and driving, and it's amazing how you can just see the shape of those ancient water flows on the land once you know what to look for.
- peatmoss 8y agoThe National Bison Range near Missoula has a placard at an overlook that claims the outflow of water was 9 cubic miles per minute. I don’t know if that number is correct, because it defies all sense of scale.