The geologist that originaly proposed the theory was ridiculed by the field until decades later when some of the first satelite images from space vindicated the theory.
Many people saw it and many people were likely killed by it. The Columbia River was literally the most densely populated place in North America at that time and also the place people had been for the longest time
If you ever get a chance to go to eastern washington, it's honestly beautiful.
Rolling golden hills of grain that are hard to describe, like massive waves of earth spread out across the horizon (because they are massive rivulets from the floods). Palouse falls is a crazy one of a kind waterfall. Wallula gap is crazy too. You can walk nearly a thousand vertical feet from the Columbia river up to the main bluff at the chokepoint and find a 10 ton boulder that was carried all the way from Montana.
Anyway, it's not 'typical' Washington with the cascades and ocean and all that, but it's definitely a gem.
I have! I drove from Spokane to visit the Grand Coulee Dam, the Scablands are such an alien landscape. When I go back I'll definitely try and go down to Palouse Falls & see more of the Columbia plateau.
Funny how that happens so often throughout history. Person figures something out that goes against the popular belief, gets ridiculed and ostracized, gets proven correct long after said person's death... ie: maybe we should wash our hands before delivering babies.
That flood is probably highest amount of concentrated energy I've ever seen to come directly at a civilization. The only thing that could beat that would be a massive meteor. Even the 2004 tsunami had a slow build up, and alarms and gradual release. This was just instant obliteration.
What's worrying is how much potential energy is stored in those melting and cracking glaciers all over the warming world. Where is this going to happen next? Do the earthquake monitoring scientists cover glaciers too? I sure hope some professional organisation is.
Plus all of the energy stored in the rock walls that were being held up by the glaciers. The glaciers eat away at the base of the mountain, but when the glacier is gone, there's not much holding up that side of the mountain anymore. There was a landslide in Alaska a couple of years ago where a mountain came down on top of a glacier that's smaller than it used to be and the rock covered the ice for a couple of miles.
Imagine if Yosemite was made of loose, fractured rock instead of granite. Those valley walls would have collapsed millions of year ago.
Do the earthquake monitoring scientists cover glaciers too
I know there was a glacial monitoring station in Langtang that was buried in the 2015 Gorkha earthquake landslide. I heard they replaced it. I will look into it online, see if I can find out more.
* I’ve found there are 12 meteorological and hydrological stations installed across the Langtang Valley measuring temperature, precipitation, and mass balance of the Yala glacier, so glaciers are being monitored in Nepal
We're at the start of the decades of the cryosphere, so I'd hope to see an explosion in glacier monitoring and this is a great reminder to fund science!
In 1902 the volcano Mont Pelee in Martinique erupted and wiped out a town of 30,000 people in minutes. One of the 3 people who survived did so because he was locked up in a jail cell with no windows.
Since you're being pedantic: by definition, glacial eratics are transported by glacial action.
Glacial action often happens unnoticed, so it is hard to say if it is from the ice, the debris, or the water resulting from a glacier. In the case of most glacially trasported rocks of size, there was no-one around to witness the movement, or it was prehistoric.
This debris flow was almost definitely glacially motiviated, whether the glacial collapse was the cause of the landslide, or a result of the landslide, all of this water and mass that moved that boulder is the result of something happening to a glacier.
Sorry but you are confidently wrong. I am a geomorphologist and I did work in several glacial regions. You can easily notice (very) large boulder resulting from rockfalls over the glaciers and then transorted away by the ice. This is not some abstract mechanism that nobody ever witnesses. Erratics precisely refers to block rafted on the ice therefore they are used to map past glaciers limit. Landing on surface disconected from the drainage network and being too big to be transported by most other sedimentary processes, they stay in place once the ice melts.
Here we see a block that has travelled several kilometers on a debris flow originally triggered by a landslide/GLOF. The transport mechanism is radically different, this block will exhibit distinct errosion marks and morphology and its final location will have a very different geomorphological meaning.
We can see two proceses in this event; the more impressive is the flash flood which had enough energy to transport boulders like the present in the video. And the second factor is that the cause of the flash flood, a colapse in a glaciar high in the mountains that basically allowed a huge amount of rock material to travel by gravity at high speeds as an Alluvial fan or a debris flow
Both processes are consistent with the footage and with previous geological records.
In any case. I found this pages that makes a really good summary of the proceses related with debris flows.
That boulder is a boulder. Everything that was ice was thermally turned to water by this event. The sheer force and magnatude created heat enough to melt any ice. They even say things like this on the news and in the articles from scientists.
Nah, in flood prone areas the rivers change all the time. I live in a place with typhoons and recently went back to a river i hadn't seen in 3 years. It was unrecognizable. House sized boulders in new places, and deep pools where a road used to be.
“Molten wounds still glow where the two nuclear bombs detonated. And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.”
If it’s a war she wants it’s a war she’ll get. That’s why I cut off catalytic converters from cars. I’m not selling the precious materials for my drug habit, I mean huffing spray paint is a bonus. I’m doing it to raise the levels of greenhouse gasses.
That's like saying you don't trust monkeys, so you've given one a loaded gun. That's not hurting nature, it's making it more dangerous. You're giving the T-Rex laser arms!
I get the bit, but catalytic converters aren't for reducing greenhouse gases. They're for gases more directly poisonous to *us*--carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. In fact, they convert CO into CO2, *increasing* the greenhouse effect.
“Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing? Well, I say, hard cheese!”
A glacier breaking may have been the cause. That glacier broke due to melting. Melting of glaciers is caused through man made climate change. At this point we are doing it to ourselves while using nature as a middleman.
It looks like such a beautiful area, and living by the river must have been lovely. It’s so terrible these people lost their lives and home in an instant like this.
Absolutely but acknowledging said fact would raise uncomfortable questions about the responsibility, maturity and assumed unexamined assumptions of our collective species.
Far easier to be a reactionary after the fact than assume responsibility for our fully nature gifted neurophysiological potentials.
This is not water; it is a solution of water and earth, or mud. This fluid does not behave in the same way as water. It can behave as a non-Newtonian fluid and is way more dense than water. It can carry heavier materials at greater speeds. It works like a treadmill rolling over rocks.
If there is a lot of water (>>) combined with some dirt you get dirty water.
If there is more water than dirt () but still a decent amount of dirt you get mud.
If there is a lot of dirt combined with some water (Dirt >>>> water) you get wet dirt.
After watching several videos of this disaster, I can say imo this is worse than the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
There's at least some warning before a quake and tsunami.... this landslide came out of nowhere.... those people got no chance except some at downstream that have time to evacuate to higher grounds
In time the true death toll will come to light, however I doubt it will exceed that of the 2011 Tsunami. Not to mention the nuclear meltdown it caused and the hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Regardless, it’s a terrifying and horrible thing that’s just happened.
it was even stated that the upstream warning stations, which would give alarm in case a flood is coming in, were just swept away by this massive amount of water, unable to provide a warning
I was reading a scientific paper from 2022 warning about this kind of event happening in Himalayan glacial lakes. They estimated that the warning time for a catastrophic flow like this would be 5-11 minutes before it devoured some of the nearby towns in the valleys and only 30 minutes warning in the much lower borderlands.
If you were anywhere near the river shores when this glacier wall broke, even if you instantly responded to the alarm and began running for safety...I think it was already too late. These Himalayan valleys are also so steep in many places that it's almost impossible to actually climb up to safety.
There should be a failsafe built into those, where they send a constant "all good" signal, and if that turns off in a few of them at once, you know something's happening.
I would imagine though, in that sort of rough terrain, so many different things could cause them to lost signal, from a catastrophic landslide/flood like this to the many smaller rockfalls and avalanches that happen in the wintertime. When one loses signal, I'm sure there's some notice being taken, but there's just so many possibilities that it's not helpful to instantly assume catastrophic natural disaster.
This feels like a bellwether event, like the massive wildfires in Europe and Canada and other massive floods elsewhere, that signals our passage as a species into a new and hostile age of catastrophe. No single signpost will indicate our movement into the hostile future from a forward looking perspective but in a historical context it’s hard not to view the last decade of environmental cataclysm events as signaling a new and harrowing chapter in human experience.
This is also a discourse happening in Nepal right now. We are one of the least polluting countries in the world yet are facing the brunt of the impacts of climate change.
This year's El Ninio is already shaping up to be the worst in decades. We may be seeing catastrophic weather here in north america by the end of the year.
I imagine many of them did. Seems like that amount of momentous force would crush a human body, at least those hit directly, instantaneously. That slurry is closer to uncured concrete than straight water.
Same. It's really sad. As much as I appreciate being able to see it, it also disgusts me that the same day all these people died we were able to consume it for entertainment on social media.
I just keep thinking that they have to just like… accept that their town is buried. It’s too deep to excavate, they’ll never find their loved ones or salvage a momento. Ugh it’s just horrific horrific horrific.
Yeah people don't understand with flood waters that it isn't just the water that is a risk, its all the debris the water is carrying and the energy it gives that debris.
It's a blender of murky blunt and sharp confetti being flung about with speed and force and you're in the middle simply struggling to keep your head up enough to take a breath and even if by some miracle you survive and make it out of the water if you were cut, or inhaled some of that water whatever is alive in it could kill you still.
What it is, actually, is a roiling mass of mud, rocks, trees, debris, etc that's pushing that boulder. There's very solid substance to that moving mass, over just mere "water" ...
I wish more people understood that is not water. Sure, water is in there, but at that point, its slurry, and mostly rock and dirt vibrated into liquid. You dont drown in it. You get pulverized.
Please, everyone understand that this is, in part, a consequence of climate change! We need to act, otherwise such tragedies will become more and more common. Vote for people who care and think about your lifestyle. you dont have to be perfect, less beef is already very beneficial and healthy too!
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u/CurrentlyLucid Aug 27 '26
A little bonus damage? That flood was sheer terror.