“Scientific research by its nature leaves an ample paper trail. But in their own way,
scientific papers are as incomplete as any political or social records. While they recount the
evidence and arguments at stake they omit much of what is of human interest: how people
came to their discoveries and insights and how they felt about them…” Naomi Oreskes
(2003) xii.
The myths: a) that there is a universal scientific method; and b) that scientists think and
unfold their investigations as methodically as implied in this idealized outline of a scientific
paper…in a word? Fantasy. Surely an ideal, but rarely how the world works.
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It is useful to compare the outcomes of two scientists’ careers whose lives started at about
the same time, and whose ideas were equally unorthodox at about the same time.
Wegener and J Harlen Bretz were born within two years one another (1880 and 1882). Each
began to espouse a counter-current notion of how to explain his observations, just before
World War I.
J Harlen Bretz concerned himself with a rather more geographically discrete puzzle than
did Alfred Lothar Wegener. Rather than fitting all the continents together, Bretz confronted
what appeared to him overwhelming evidence over the eastern half of Washington State that
one or more horrendous, catastrophic floods or cataclysms had savagely torn away soils that
should have built up as they had everywhere else in the Pacific Northwest., south of
Pleistocene continental ice sheets
15
So, what was Bretz looking at? Here, an overview in Google Earth, of eastern Washington’s
channeled scablands. For reference, Portland OR in lower left on the lower Columbia,
Seattle WA, due north of Portland, and Spokane near the eastern edge of the channeled
scablands. Note the purple vertical arrow near the top centre of this image. That’s Dry
Falls, part of the Grand Coulee system we shall look at more closely.
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With the aid of remote sensing, or Google Earth, it is easy today to explore some of the
awesome dimensions of Bretz’s inferred cataclysms. Here Dry Falls Lake (a plunge pool),
several other lakes and artificial impoundments, scoured bedrock, and kolk lake features.
But remember that Bretz and his students were earthbound—actually surface-bound—to a
far greater extent than we are today. They had not the luxury of flying over, much less
looking down with satellite imagery, at the surface of Earth. Here, we are looking down at a
corner of the channeled scablands of eastern Washington State that Bretz and his students
interpreted as signs of catastrophic flooding in the late Pleistocene.
17
This is an aerial oblique view of Dry Falls Lake, a mere remnant spot of “wetness” in the
enormous plunge basin into which an almost unimaginably deep sheet of water tumbled
during one or more of the Bretz or Spokane or Missoula Lake floods. In the distance is the
impoundment behind a hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River (Roosevelt Reservoir) and
the dam that ends in the upper right corner at Coulee City. Closer to us, the Dry Falls cliffs,
which form a pair of arcs totalling something like four times the size of Niagara Falls in
New York State and Ontario. At the base of Dry Falls cliffs is the arc of lakes created
originally as the Plunge Basin. The bulk of the Columbia River discharge at one time
flowed over Dry Falls for thousands of years.
18
This artist’s rendition is of Dry Falls at normal late Pleistocene discharge by the Columbia
River. Again, this “normal” (as opposed to catastrophic flooding) flow dwarfed today’s
discharge from the Great Lakes over Niagara Falls by at least a factor of 4, maybe as much
as 10.
By contrast with this scene pictured here, imagine catastrophic flood, during which an
estimated 100 m of water cascaded over the 120-m high lip of the falls along a front of 40
km, and crossing that plunge at speeds of 60-70 mph (100 + kmh). In reality, 15-18,000
years ago, this torrent of water would have been brownish, laden with debris, and flowing so
fast that the lip of the falls would have formed a minor crease where the water surface
inclined to a slightly sharper angle of descent.
19
You don’t have to leave catastrophic floods proposed by J Harlen Bretz entirely to your
imagination. Stev Ominski, an artist closely associated with the geological communities
along the Columbia River has used his artistic talents to picture an episode of peak
cataclysm at Dry Falls. That elongated ridge in the background was in the previous two
images, viewed from a different angle. Ominski’s depiction is of a view to the east across
the plunge basins at the foot of Dry Falls.
20
So, we have just progressed through three views of Dry Falls, first an oblique aerial shot
from today, with the dam upstream, and the old plunge basin, looking basically from the
southwest. 2. looking directly north at the normal Columbia River flow during the last
glacial maximum, and 3. looking eastward at Dry Falls and the head of the scablands
country at full catastrophic flood, with something approaching 150 m of roiling water
engulfing the notched island below the falls.
21
Again, remember that Bretz and other investigators in the early 20th century dealt with clues
that they largely had to perceive and interpret strictly from ground level. Gulch-filling
gravel bars and giant ripple marks were indicators of the depth and velocity of inferred
cataclysmic flooding. Compared to what we can appreciate in a few minutes’ navigation
with Google Earth, Bretz had to work for weeks to appreciate, and be pretty clever with
spatial relations on top of that.
22
J Harlen Bretz spent his early career in the region he called the channeled scablands of
eastern Washington. He patiently amassed solid information that persuaded him of the
enormity of prehistoric flooding. Catastrophic flooding accounted for the stripping away of
soil from bedrock, over-sized river channels, waterfalls that dwarfed any modern waterfalls,
glacial erratic boulders. But he could not identify a credible source for the enormous
amounts of water that had to have been involved. Joseph Pardee of the USGS made a
career out of identifying the dimensions of one big proglacial lake. He knew that this lake
contained a lot of water, but by 1927 he had not yet discovered any field evidence that it
emptied catastrophically when Bretz was so savagely held up to public critique by scientific
colleagues.
23
Today, we think nothing of peering down at the earth’s surface from space, or using Google
Earth to do that for us. J Harlen Bretz (1882-1981) was publicly skewered in 1927 for his
unsupported hypotheses of catastrophic flooding through the Channeled Scablands. In
1940-42 Joseph Pardee in Montana returned to his earlier study of the dimensions of
Glacial Lake Missoula, and discovered that within the lower reaches of this impoundment,
where the lake itself must have been as much as 650 m (2,000 feet) deep when the ice dam
broke through, there were giant ripple marks of the same sort described by Bretz years
earlier from the channeled scablands. Pardee quietly reported his discovery that there was
enough water released by Lake Missoula’s sudden emptyings to account for Bretz’s floods.
Pardee’s discoveries did not arouse immediate interest during the years of WW II.
Belatedly, in 1962, the American Geological Society conferred one of its highest
distinctions on J for nothing Harlen Bretz. Most of his critics and detractors were already
deceased, but he at least lived another 19 years to savor his triumph.
What is so easy for us to see today using satellites, telescopes, and other forms of remote
sensing devices was too close underfoot for most observers to appreciate. So the Darwins,
the Wegeners, the Bretzes and the Pardees pioneered in an era that pre-dated much of the
remote sensing that we take for granted today.
24
This is not a depiction of Alaska’s Inside Passage on a windy wintry day, but an artist’s
image-ination of how the surface of Ice Age Lake Missoula might have appeared, some
18,000 to 15,000 years ago. Lake Missoula was an enormous body of fresh water
impounded by one southern extremity of the Canadian continental ice sheet, near the end of
the Pleistocene. When he was a practicing field geologist in the 1920s, J Harlen Bretz
amassed evidence primarily in eastern Washington State that led him to conclude that one or
more catastrophic floods had left their mark in a region he called the channeled scablands.
Bretz and Wegener were ridiculed by scientific colleagues for their iconoclastic ideas.
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Pardee’s vindication of J. Harlen Bretz was pretty cool. Bretz got to enjoy the veneration he
deserved for the last 20 years of his nearly 100-year lifespan. Wegener, the other 20th
century challenger of gradualism missed his own vindication by over 30 years by dying at
age 50 in 1930.
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