Channeled Scablands

Common card · No. 215511

The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods. They are located in 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. These floods were periodically unleashed whenever a large glacial lake broke through its ice dam and swept across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. The last of the cataclysmic floods occurred between 18,200 and 14,000 years ago. The floods eroded the area into the Palouse loess. Geologist J Harlen Bretz defined "scablands" in a series of papers written in the 1920s as lowlands diversified by a multiplicity of irregular channels and rock basins eroded into basalt. Flood waters eroded...

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