Missoula floods

The Missoula floods (also known as the Spokane floods or the Bretz floods or Bretz's floods) were cataclysmic glacial lake outburst floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge at the end of the last ice age. These floods were the result of periodic sudden ruptures of the ice dam on the Clark Fork River that created Glacial Lake Missoula. After each ice dam rupture, the waters of the lake would rush down the Clark Fork and the Columbia River, flooding much of eastern Washington and the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. After the lake drained, the ice would reform, creating Glacial Lake Missoula again. These floods have been researched since the 1920s. During the last deglaciation that followed the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, geologists estimate that a cycle of flooding and reformation of the lake lasted an average of 55 years and that the floods occurred several times over the 2,000-year period between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago. U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jim O'Connor and Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales scientist Gerardo Benito have found evidence of at least twenty-five massive floods, the largest discharging about 10 cubic kilometers per hour (2.7 million m3/s, 13 times that of the Amazon River). Alternate estimates for the peak flow rate of the largest flood include 17 cubic kilometers per hour and range up to 27 cubic kilometers per second. The maximum flow speed approached 36 meters/second (130 km/h or 80 mph). Within the Columbia River drainage basin, detailed investigation of the Missoula floods' glaciofluvial deposits, informally known as the Hanford formation, has documented the presence of Middle and Early Pleistocene Missoula flood deposits within the Othello Channels, Columbia River Gorge, Channeled Scabland, Quincy Basin, Pasco Basin, and the Walla Walla Valley. Based on the presence of multiple interglacial calcretes interbedded with flood deposits, magnetostratigraphy, optically stimulated luminescence dating, and unconformity truncated clastic dikes, it has been estimated that the oldest of the Pleistocene Missoula floods happened before 1.

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Related concepts (8)

Channeled Scablands

The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods within the southeastern part of Washington state. The Channeled Scablands were scoured by more than 40 cataclysmic floods during the Last Glacial Maximum and innumerable older cataclysmic floods over the last two million years.

Missoula floods

Proglacial lake

In geology, a proglacial lake is a lake formed either by the damming action of a moraine during the retreat of a melting glacier, a glacial ice dam, or by meltwater trapped against an ice sheet due to isostatic depression of the crust around the ice. At the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, large proglacial lakes were a widespread feature in the northern hemisphere. The receding glaciers of the tropical Andes have formed a number of proglacial lakes, especially in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, where 70% of all tropical glaciers are.