Did B.C. Melting Cause Ice-Age Megaflood?
By Bud Mortenson Robert Young is stepping into some turbulent scientific waters. The Assoc. Prof. of Geography and Earth and Environmental Sciences at UBC Okanagan is exploring new evidence suggesting an Ice-Age megaflood that created Washington State’s Channeled Scablands about 15,000 years ago partly originated in south-central British Columbia, not exclusively from Montana as the prevailing theory suggests. The megaflood’s statistics are staggering. Arriving from the northeast, a wall of water tall enough to leave gravel bars 120 metres high ripped across Washington at 120 kilometres per hour, eroding more than 80 cubic kilometers of earth and rock in two or three days. The torrent left a scoured 25,000-square-km landscape riddled with deep canyons — known as coulees — carved out of the hard bedrock. “The question of where all that water came from has been hotly debated for decades,” says Young. Most think the floodwater came from Glacial Lake Missoula, 400 kilometres away in Mont
