The Case Against an Age Old Earth

In March 2017, author Glenn Hodges, along with photographer Michael Melford, developed an interesting article for National Geographic, entitled: “Formed by Megafloods, This Place Fooled Scientists for Decades,” and sub-titled: “Geologists couldn't account for the strange landforms of eastern Washington State. Then a high school teacher dared to question the scientific dogma of his day.”

The Channeled Scablands, near Othello, Washington. This 60-square mile area called Drumheller, is the most spectacular tract of butte-and-basin scabland on the plateau

In this area known today as the Channeled Scablands of east-central Washington, is a complex of anastomosing rock-cut fluvial channels, cataracts, loess islands, rock basins, broad gravel deposits, and immense gravel bars.
    In the 1920s, J. Harlen Bretz, recipient of the Penrose Medal, the Geological Society of America’s highest award, demonstrated that the Channeled Scabland by cataclysmic erosion and deposition from megaflooding, Hodges wrote: “In the middle of eastern Washington, in a desert that gets less than eight inches of rain a year, stands what was once the largest waterfall in the world. It is three miles wide and 400 feet high—ten times the size of Niagara Falls—with plunge pools at its base suggesting the erosive power of an immense flow of water. Today there is not so much as a trickle running over the cataract’s lip. It is completely dry.”
    The interesting thing about the floods that raged through this area is that they put parts of Idaho, Washington and Oregon under hundreds of feet of water in just a few days. This catastrophic flooding channeled water at 65 miles per hour through the Upper Grand Coulee and over this 400-foot rock face about 2000 years ago, with scientists estimating that the falls were not only five times the width of Niagara, but had ten times the flow of all the current rivers in the world combined. Today, this area provides a tranquil appearing series of plunge pools, ground-water-fed lakes and an oasis for wildlife. But during the flooding, huge boulders and gigantic rock ledges were ripped apart and strewn across the landscape, many tumbling along the final escape path of the flood waters that eventually made their way to the Pacific, leaving out-of-place boulders, mostly of different rock types than the underlying bedrock of the region, scattered throughout the scabland, as though some giant hand rolled them down through the valley in a random manner.
    These over-sized exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above the highest recorded river level today show where the unchecked flood waters carried them along, depositing them here and there among the incredible landforms scoured out by the floodwaters or near the potholes the waters filled forty to fifty feet deep and gouged out channels 400-feet lower than the area’s basin, as the they rushed on their way to the sea. This, of course, created the Scabland as the flood accelerated across the tilted surface of the Palouse slope, causing massive instantaneous erosion—much of the sediment was carried all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

The Dry Falls, a 200-foot high wall over which the three-mile long waterfall once flowed

This desolate region, now stripped of soil, have numerous dry waterfalls and potholes hundreds of feet above the modern river, and gigantic gravel bars that were deposited within dry valleys that could only suggest deep, fast-flowing water. In the midst of the area are streamlines hills that rise like islands, higher than a hundred feet above the scoured-out channelways that was once covered with rolling loess (windblown silt) hills up to 250 feet high.
    In major channels, the Flood removed huge amounts of loess, exposing the basalt bedrock. Once the loess blanket was removed, exposing underlying basalt, the floodwaters began carving the scabland features we see today. Interestingly, the basalt between grooves looks like old broken asphalt roads. According to Victor R. Baker, a Hydrologist at the University of Arizona (“The Channeled Scabland: A Retrospective,” Review in Advance, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 2009), “The water would begin by eroding longitudinal grooves, probably associated with longitudinal vortex structure in the macroturbulent flow field."
    According to geologist Nick Zentner of Department of Geological Sciences, Central Washington University, and recipient of the prestigious James Shea Award in geology, “The bedrock of eastern Washington is the key to understanding how the floods were able to carry away so much rock. If the bedrock of the Scabland was mostly granite or metamorphic rock, I don't think coulees and scabland would've formed. But the basalt bedrock, riddled with cooling fractures, was pre-cut and ready to be hauled off!"

Huge areas of stark basalt remained after aeolian sediment called “loess” (a very fine-grained silt of sand and clay loosely cemented by calcium carbonate that covers about 10% of the Earth) was washed away in the Flood

The receding flood, once freed from its containment, ripped this area apart, and Geologists estimate the waters swept through the area at 65 mph, 200 to 400 feet deep! J Harlen Bretz was the first geologist to promote the idea of huge Ice Age Floods sweeping through the Columbia Basin. In 1923 he wrote: “Drumheller is the most spectacular tract of butte-and basin scabland on the plateau. It is an almost unbelievable labyrinth of anastamosing channels, rock basins, and small abandoned cataracts. It has always been difficult for scientists, especially geologists to think in terms of a single Flood, let alone Noah’s Flood found in Genesis. In fact, they would rather believe that this area was caused by Ice-Age flooding of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, particularly glacial Lake Missoula in western Montana and northern Idaho, than consider Noah’s Flood. Studies of this region and the high-energy flood processes that generated it have stimulating a discovery of similar megaflood-related landscapes around the world, regarding an enhanced understanding of the processes involved in the fluvial erosion of bedrock, and the use of paleoflood indicators for understanding the magnitudes and frequency of flooding.
    However, a simpler and more direct answer is to recognize the universal Flood of Genesis and that areas like this in Washington, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and similar areas elsewhere, were the results of a gigantic Flood caused by the receding waters that once covered the entire planet.
    According to David R. Montgomery, in “Biblical-Type Floods Are Real, and They’re Absolutely Enormous,” article (Discover Magazine, August 2012), “Long before the discovery of the scablands, geologists dismissed the role of catastrophic floods in interpreting European geology. By the end of the 19th century such ideas not only were out of fashion but were geological heresy.”

In fact, when J. Harlen Bretz (left), a Washington school teacher uncovered evidence of giant floods in eastern Washington in the 1920s, it took almost the entire 20th century for geologists to believe him because “they had so thoroughly vilified the concept of great floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence of one.”
    In 1925, geologist Dr. William C. Alden, chief of the Pleistocene Section of the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote that the phenomena of the Scabland flood certainly appears to be river work “if you could only show where all the water came from in so short a time.”     Interestingly, many areas of this universal flood were contained after the water began to recede by self-contained topography, such as mountains or even a moraine, which built up inland lakes and even gigantic seas, such as the shallow Skull Creek Seaway covering most of the Great Basin in the U.S., and Lake Agassiz or Lake Ojibway, among others, such as the megaflood occurring down the valley from ancient Lake Atna in the Copper River Basin in south-central Alaska considered to have been a forming lake with no permanent outlet, creating an endorheic (closed sea) when it finally broke through the surrounding mountains that had contained it.
    In Washington, when the dams holding these flood waters finally collapsed, a torrent of water was released hundreds of feet deep, which swept southwesterly--gouging the huge coulees of eastern Washington, ripping out sediment and basalt rock, and stripping soil and vegetation from thousands of square miles of land in the Columbia Basin. Some of the debris was carried by the floods all the way to the ocean.
    One flood pathway created the Grand Coulee. A second poured into the lowlands around Ephrata, Moses Lake and Othello. A third flowed along the western fringe of the Palouse Hills, removing vast amounts of fertile topsoil. More than 2,000 square miles of so-called “scablands” were created. Each bursting dam episode added to the overall impact.
    While geologists have yet to recognize that all of these events were the result of trapped flood waters eventually bursting their containment and gouging their way to the oceans, we do have obvious evidence of such having taken place. The one in Washington, like the Grand Canyon in Arizona, are mute testimony of this gigantic Flood that changed the topography of an entire planet.