Episode #100: Columbia Gorge MegaFloods / Tsunamis, Submarine Canyons & Shelf-slope Landslides

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Yeah, that's what I've been told. That's the rumor. Yeah. As a matter of fact, we are. Yeah. We'll be a dental floss tycoon. I was hoping that nobody would say that. What? Yes, it happens every time somebody does. You guys know that, right? Come on. Dental floss tycoon? I don't understand. If that's a reference, I completely don't get it. So it's just, I don't, I'm not sure I want to know what that is. Wait, let me guess. Let me guess. It's a Fargo reference. No. Let's see. I'm going to move to Montana soon. Going to become a dental floss tycoon. Oh, it's some band I'm not aware of. Frank Zappa. Oh, yes. Frank, our old pal Frank. Frank Zappa. Well-known composer of Catholic girls. And Susie Cream Cheese. Yeah. Going out to the big sky country. Yeah, good stuff. Susie Cream Cheese. Oh, that's, um. I was trying to get past that one. I'm surprised. Okay. Back on track. So we're going to Montana. Soon. Montana. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we got, we have to, sometimes we have to reel these guys in. And it's sold out. So it's going to be, it's going to be a big 45 minutes talking old bands. Sorry. So yeah, it's sold out. It's going to be great. Uh, but we are getting back into recording normal episodes. Um. Hey, a lot of the time in the car with Randall driving around, you know, it's not all geology and esoteric. No, it's not. Yeah. He loves talking about, uh. He likes talking about rock. Yeah. As well as rock. Yeah. And music probably is number one. So, uh. Yeah. We've talked a lot about music riding around the country. Yeah. If, if there's somebody else in one of the vans with Randall that, that likes all the same old movies and stuff, it'll just be those two going back and forth, talking about things that no one else in the van understands for hours. Yes. Complicated matters that are over your head. That's right. It goes right over. I'm driving. So I don't care. Entire storylines of movies. Russ. Some of those movies are just things I made up. They only exist in my imagination. Okay, good. It's going to be you and me, uh, on point. Lead van. Okay, good. Yeah. And then probably Ben and Randall. Maybe. I'm sure. Are you driving a van or are you doing lunch stuff? I don't know. It doesn't matter. But yeah. I might be doing lunch stuff. Ben's going to be there. It's going to be awesome. Yeah. There's still some tickets for the Trumberland tour that's coming up. End of October over Halloween. Going to have a little costume party and, uh, you know, tour around the middle Cumberland plateau there. So yeah, that's, that's going to be fun. Yeah. I plan to go as a, as a boulder of MetaQuartz site. Oh, no, it's out. What? Why is that funny? Yeah. I was thinking that's a great costume. I was trying to come up with something really quick, but you beat me to it. I mean, a boulder of MetaQuartz site is, that's a good one. I want to be a crypto explosion structure. How do I? Yeah. We're going to see a couple. We might as well. How do I make that costume? I was going to be Turbidite. Turbidite, of course. So what's the plan for this evening, Randall? RIP, Jimmy Buffett. A few things. You know, I thought we'd look at some interesting papers that have come out recently. I thought we'd also maybe take a look, for those that weren't at the live stream, some of the things that have been developing in the plasma energy front. And what else? A few things about where we might be visiting on the Cumberland tour. Let's see here, if I can find something here. It'll, okay. How about this? Let me do a share screen here, and we'll just dive right in. Oh, yeah. Happy anniversary, fourth anniversary here. 100 shows, four years. We hope to keep going here. Yeah, we do. All right, one of the mysterious places we'll probably be exploring on the Cumberland tour. So we're adding some of these. This tour, I think, will be unique from the others in that a lot of places we're going to be going are sort of way off the beaten path. Yeah, I'm going out in a couple of days to do some more recon with the guys. Yep. Do some of the new spots, because, yeah, it's going to be almost totally different than the one we did last year. So where's this cave? We got one day that overlaps what we did last year, but otherwise, we're going to see a bunch of new stuff, and like Randall said, off the beaten path. The cave is, it's still at this point a sort of a, what can I say? I don't know exactly where the cave is. Rowan and Brad have that scoped out. And it's one of those that is not supposed to be publicized. Well, yeah, that's the thing. They're not state parks. They're not necessarily public access, but they're known by the locals. And we've been digging a little bit. Rowan has. And, you know, we're going to see if we can create some special experiences for the people that go on this one with us. Yep. Okay. Oh, that looks familiar. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, we're still on the waterfall, but that's somebody back up under the undercut, though, so for some scale on that one. Yeah. All right. Are you seeing this? Yeah. All right. And just, okay, I'm going to zoom so you can get the sense of the scale. Here's the people for scale. Oh, wow. Yeah, look at that. Yeah. Oh, that makes me think of the. Yeah, I know what you're going to say. In Texas. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But this is in Tennessee. The place we were. The gorge here? Yeah. The gorge, yeah. Yeah. The one that was cut. That was it. What was it? 20 years ago? Catastrophically in three days. Tany Lake Gorge. Tany Lake Gorge. Tany Lake Gorge, right? Yeah, 2003, right? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's an underfit, too. Look at those cliffs on the sides. Yeah, no kidding. Sure. Yeah, you got that. Good. Astute observation, Kyle. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Let's see if I close that. And try this. And I'll bring share again. So this is the Caney Fork Overlook. Are we seeing it? Yep. Okay, good. Now, what's interesting here is you can really kind of see how the tops of these, what look to be hills, aren't really hills. They're the surface of the plateau. Yeah. So you had, yeah, so pretty much at one time, you know, all of this was connected by a land surface, and somewhere over some unspecified length of time or some unspecified number of episodes, these valleys were downcut into the flat plateau. Yeah, it's similar to what we have here. It's a plateau, and, like, if you look out over it, you can see that all the hills are basically the same, roughly the same height. Uh-huh. None of them, you know, and it's because it's basically a bunch of valleys cut into the plateau top. Well, yeah, the limestone, right, was set down in layers at the bottom of the sea at the time, right? Yeah. So then the gorges, what do they call them down there? Because, yeah, Rowan said up in Tennessee, right, they call them gulfs. They're not necessarily canyons or coolies, they're gulfs. We call them hills and hollers. Hills and hollers. Hollers seems to be ubiquitous. So do you think that landscape is possible to be made by gradualism or... Does it need these episodic, large-scale events to get that down-cutting? Well, I would think that just because of, like, the previous thing we saw was Caney Fork, uh, the, uh, the Caney Fork Gorge, which in the picture, in the photo we were just looking at, that was at the bottom of the gorge. Oh, okay. Does that make sense? Well, the one we looked at, it reminds us of Canyon Lake Gorge in Texas that we hiked. So that's all the way in that, in the bottom of that channel. That's in the bottom of that channel. Now, that would suggest to me that there's at least some episodes, like the most recent, uh, excavation was probably catastrophic. Yeah, and then whatever cut those sheer cliffs that we were looking at way to the right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So you can, so there, in other words, there are, like, certain features that you can find that tell you there were really large flows, but you'd have to go look in more detail to determine whether or not it could be gradualistic or created by. Yeah, and here the problem, of course, is that you can't really, I mean, there's the forest, the canopy of vegetation, the thick layers of topsoil, because of thousands of years of canopy and all of that. Uh, it's very hard to see, unlike some of the features in the Western States. Okay, let's take another look at here, another possible location on our Cumberland tour. Kind of nice. And that was a quickie. Well, I got some other pictures here to look at. This is from inside the cave you were at before. Yes. Okay. And there's some surprises in that cave that I won't get into now. We do require that you sign a waiver. Otherwise, there wouldn't be surprises. When this picture was taken, it was low. But this is, what's cool about this is, you know, you've got the creek, you've got the undercutting actually is the entrance to a cave. So this is the headwaters of the Saquatchee River, which is now flowing into Saquatchee Valley. And I don't think we're going to get here, but this is, this is interesting because it's, um, let's see here. Um, isn't that nice? Yeah. I think that's on the itinerary. Let's see here. Oh yeah. This is also in the cave. There's Caney Fork Creek. Let's see. So then here's, keep going here. Okay. This is a, this is a, a creek that flows out of the rock. So this is actually a cave and the, the, the water is flowing out of this. It then flows back into the ground. And then when it reemerges from the ground, it's a, I believe it's the flow on the right here that comes in. And this is the headwaters of the Saquatchee River. So the Saquatchee River is being discharged out of the ground, but this is Greeter Falls. That's a good one with our guy Pat back there. Yeah. That's going to be one of our drivers on that. This is a rock bridge. This is mostly sandstone around here. Still, we're not in limestone. It's going to be a combination of limestone. I think it is. Yeah. Okay. And then Rowan and Pat and Nikki were out that one day, they spent the whole day from sun up to sundown, trekking trails and mapping locations, uh, really looking for the stuff off the beaten path. And, um, I guess Nikki or somebody took this photo at the end of the day, which I think is a, a testimonial to their resolute fortitude and, um, commitment to the task. Uh, looks like some commitment. So I don't think Nikki meant to take that picture. Look at his face. He's like, Oh crap. So, but the next morning, he's a dude. Yeah. Yeah. That was on purpose. So I'm really looking forward to this trip. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah, I know. Well, yeah. So here's the headwaters of the Sequatchie that are coming out of those, coming out of the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's an unknown Indian mound. We may take a little visit here and, you know, spend an afternoon excavating. No, this is an unknown Indian mound. It's not in, it's known locally, but it's not, uh, anywhere that I've been able to find or Rowan has been able to find in the, uh, in the literature anywhere or in the, you know, guidebooks. Somebody's mowing it. Yeah. You know, they've taken the trees out and kept it tended, but yeah. Otherwise it's mostly unknown. Yeah. Well, were you with him, Brad? Rowan said he stopped in and talked to the people that own most of it. I was like, yeah, it's an Indian mound, but we don't know nothing about it except that, except that the, the Cherokee said that it was already here when they got here. You have to ask my grandpappy. So I thought that was one significant piece of information that came out of it. Somebody somewhere along the lines, right? It was already here when our people arrived. Yeah. I wonder if it's been excavated before. I don't think so. You have to go through the, all the Smithsonian records. They did a bunch of excavations out of them in the late 1800s, didn't they? Oh, they sure did. Yeah. Have you ever been through the Squire and Davis book? Yeah, we have it. Yeah. Oh, well, you know, I love that book. Yeah, I do too. It's amazing. It is. But there's all the, like, the reports to the Bureau of Ethnology, you know, there's a bunch of them. Yeah. And there are hundreds of pages each. Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys have any copies of them or where are you finding them online? Yeah, you just get them in PDF, yeah. Yeah. Online. Yeah. See, I have them, you know, if you, but. Up there in my binders, I have all kinds of printed versions from when I was researching that before you could just go onto the internet and download PDFs. See, if you just waited. If I just waited 20 years, all the work of having to go over to the libraries, go up in the stacks or go to the librarian and have her or him get them out of storage, and a lot of them were in storage, then they'd get it out and then you got to haul it up to the copy machine and they're laboriously copying page after page. People just don't know. All those nickels. Nickels. Oh, yeah. Nickels. Dimes. Dimes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I got a lot of, I got a lot of money invested in that, all those printed versions. But hey, I've got the printed version of. So, yeah, a lot of these youngins, they don't realize how tough we had it back in the day. Actually having to look something up, go out, get your shoes on, go out, get in your car, drive over to the library. It might be miles away. Dust out the carbon paper. Yeah. Mike remembers how that is. The one thing I like about having Mike here. Hey, Mike's here. Yeah. Hey, Mike. I said, I'm not the oldest guy. This is, you know, this, there was a time in my life when I'd be out hanging with some dudes or whatever and like, I was the youngest guy. And then I was kind of like in the middle, there were some guys older than me and some guys younger than me and, you know, but the ratio has been shifting steadily. And now, like, wait a minute. Am I the oldest guy here? No, I can't possibly. Almost always the oldest guy. It's getting more and more frequent. Yeah. But I find myself in that exalted position. But see, when Mike's around, hey, I'll play second fiddle. I don't care. Thank you, Randall. You're welcome. These whole months. Yeah. When I met Brad, you, Brad, you were like still in high school, weren't you? Just out of high school, maybe. But Brad did have hair. I can testify to that. He had hair. He still has hair. It's just not on his head. Yeah, it's on his beard. And other places that we will leave unmentioned. Okay. Moving on. This is like a reunion show, folks. It's episode 100. Yeah. It's a reunion. It's just. Remember that time? I remember when. Well, Jesus. It's been, you know, like it's been months since we've been able to have this good time. You know? Hey, good times, man. I remember the time on the show when you suggested that your leg hair was moving to Brad's back. I thought it was to my. I think it was moving to my back. Oh, yeah. Maybe it was Brad's leg hair was moving to you. Brad's head hair moved to Randall's back, I think was what they said. I don't think that was. I don't, I don't think that. That's. That happened. Did I edit that out? The true fans will remember. Yeah. Lord. So, look, I got some serious stuff to talk about here, you guys. Okay. Okay, fine. Why bother? Let's bring it out then. Why bother? Why bother? I was going to say, Randall, I don't know what you're going to pull out there, but yeah, one of your, one of your favorite photos that you like to joke about was one of our first trips there with Bill over the Columbia Gorge there at Stonehenge Memorial, right? So we've, we've announced the first tour through the Columbia Gorge happening next September. So we're doing Montana this year. We're going to do Columbia Gorge next year. And that's definitely on the itinerary. There's a scale, full scale, uh, model of Stonehenge there on the, uh, the high banks of the Columbia river there, uh, in view of Mount hood on the other side in Oregon. It's a, just a beautiful location and, uh, so that's, that's coming up. Those, those, uh, spots are available now. It's a, it's a year away, but we've opened it up. That's some recon. I did the spring and, uh, yeah, and I know that's one of your favorite show shots there. Uh, yeah, really spectacular all, all along that Columbia Gorge. So a new, a new tour coming up for 2024, but yeah, I'm not sure what, what you're going to show next, but that, uh, that's one we've gotten a lot of smiles out of. Yeah. And I guess on that tour, we'd be visiting to some of the spectacular waterfalls. Oh yeah. Multnomah and Monterell and Oneonta. Yeah. Well, Oneonta has been closed after a fire like two or three years ago. So there was still a big fence all the way across it. So hopefully, yeah, by next summer, it'll maybe reopen, but, uh, there's plenty of other options of things to do. We got up on a beacon rock there. Yep. Uh, yeah, we're going to stay right by a hood river for three days and just, you know, absorb the gorge for, for almost three days there after coming out of Spokane, going through the Burling game Gulch and a Wollula gap. Um, so yeah, pretty, pretty strong itinerary there coming up. And, you know, it was the, uh, the, uh, the Columbia Gorge that summer, you know, my buddy Pete and I were driving through there that I was just blown away and trying to wrap my head around what in the world created all of this. And I did really get this impression that I didn't quite, I didn't, couldn't quite put a specific, uh, image onto it. I just had this impression that we carried away after that was that we felt like, or I felt like, uh, well, what is the, and Gulliver's travels. Remember when he was in the land of giants and everything was when Gulliver was in the land of giants, that's what I felt like. Um, I would just like this mini and I was looking at a landscape of giants. Uh, and that's what it feels like going through there. When you look at those fan deltas sweeping out from the hood river and the John day river and all of that, man, it's just, it's spectacular and impressive. Yeah. Mungo sized. And of course at the time you're looking at that and it's like, you're thinking, well, whatever my impression is, I'll never have any rational understanding or concept of what this is. It just seemed totally beyond me at the, at that time that I would ever be able to comprehend any of that that I was seeing, but obviously now I pretty much have a pretty clear idea of what happened. And there is a very interesting place there. Um, there's a peninsula that goes out between the John day river and a fork in the, or rather a band into Columbia that, um, well, as a matter of fact, I have Google earth open. We could pull that up. Or where are you at? Uh, no, uh, the, the nook member, the nook. Oh yeah. Okay. Let us go. That's a, that's a winery up there. Now it's, it's, uh, private access. Um, really we drove out there before off to the edge and, uh, I actually went on a GSA tour. They, they had permission to get out there, but otherwise, yeah, it's like private property. You can't get over and see that. I wonder if we could get permission. Yeah. That's the thing. You just gotta, gotta make the contacts and ask. All right. So I'm going to, but yeah, there's no shortage of, of public overlooks. Uh, yeah, it's just spectacular for about 20 plus miles there between the dolls and Portland. Right. So if we go to, I'm going to go to terrain view, we're going to look at this. Okay. But yeah, it's, you know, it's a beautiful thing, Randall, that you've repeatedly pointed out, you know, that these are not just hills. This is not just a Canyon. You know, there's a reason that this is become to look like this. You know, there was some big event that happened, you know, to the earth and, uh, you know, this is the results that we're looking at as small as we are. Um, you know, so to try to comprehend that at that point, you didn't think you would ever have a comprehension, but yeah, 50 years later, you know, you're, you're leading, leading the trail on, uh, trying to figure that out. I know other people are on it, but there, there's a bigger picture than I think they're looking at. So, um, it's, uh, the earth will talk to you if you, uh, ask some questions. That's right. We shop for everything at home now. Why can't we shop for blinds at home too? That's why I love three-day blinds. Instead of wandering around a store, three-day blinds sends a professional design consultant straight to you. They bring all the samples, help you see what actually works in your space, take expert measurements, and even handle the installation. We've all bought something that looked great in a store and looked terrible once we got home. With three-day blinds, you see everything in your actual light with your actual furniture before you commit. Plus, whether you're home or away, you can control your window treatments with the three-day blinds app. So for a free, no charge, no obligation consultation, head to three-dayblinds.com slash pod 50 for our buy one, get one 50% off deal. That's the number three, D-A-Y blinds.com slash pod 50. Are we seeing this? Google Maps? Yeah, that's the nook there. I recognize that. Excellent. Okay, so check over here. This is what Brad was referring to. Mary Hill, the stone. You can see the Stonehenge Memorial, and it sits right on the bluff. Let's see. I bet you we can even get a picture here of it. Did that work? I flew the drone too. I got some cool drone shots of it. So this is great, even though it's not stone, it's cast concrete. But nonetheless, you can certainly get the size and the scale, the magnitude of the thing. That's not a very good picture here. This one's a little better. So it's worth a stop, and we will have a lecture on the symbolism and the geometry and the astronomy of Stonehenge while we're here. Yeah, this kind of gives you a sense of the perspective of the Columbia Gorge there. At least this is actually sort of on the east side. No, the north side. It's on the Washington side. Correct. And that would be your heel stone. Yeah, some people might have caught that there. At St. Mary's, there's a longboard track there that people do their skateboarding races on. Some people might be familiar with it. It's right there. Yep. St. Mary's Hill. Well, yeah, that'll make an interesting diversion. Okay, so let's see. Did we get to... Yeah, Randall's a badass on the longboard. You got to see that. I do. Got to see that. Is there a video? If not, we'll take some once he gets on it. No. Yeah, I'm sure that the video will go viral. Randall Carlson meets untimely demise. Randall Carlson longboards the Columbia Gorge. That would be, dude, awesome. Yeah. Okay, so then right here is the John Day River coming through here. Now, this is very interesting here, and hopefully we will be able to get some permission to get in here. But there's a place called the Nook, and I'm going to zoom in. You can see the Nook right here. Now, if I go jump back to Google Earth, and I'm looking at this, the river is at 293, just called it 300 feet. And the ridge between them is at 1,228. So it's about 900 feet above the present-day river, roughly, just roughly, 1,100, 1,100, 1,200, 1,222. Okay, so then if we go into the, zoom into the John Day River, we're at 267 feet. Now, I want you to visualize now how a normal river flood, not a flash flood, but a typical flood, you know, where you have a lot of rainfall, you have tributaries feeding into the main river. If you look at any of the floods on the main rivers, say, in North America, any of the catastrophic floods of the last few decades, what you see is, you know, there'll be, the water level will be rising. You know, let's say the Mississippi, you've got dikes there. Will the rising of the water, you know, is getting almost to the top of the dikes? Is it going to flow over the dikes and really cause catastrophic flooding? Like it did in 93, when the Mississippi River, it had so much rainfall in the upper watershed that the river just rose up. Now, I want you to look at this map here or look at Google Earth. If you had the normal, typical river flood, you could imagine that the river is rising. Now, a fast rise would be considered, you know, several feet per day. That would be based upon modern river floods. Well, as this, the main river is rising, it's going to back flood into the tributary, right? And it is also going to rise. So there will be some lag between the elevation of the water in the tributary and in the main channel. But overall, it won't be, it won't be, it won't be a significant span of time between them. But as the main channel river rises, the tributary rivers are going to be rising right, mostly right along with it, right? So if the water here rises 100 feet, it's also going to rise 100 feet in the tributary. Okay, well, if we come back here and you look, here's the so-called nook right here. And you can actually see, look at this, some scab land in here. Look at this. Here's your textbook scab land where you can see what happened. Water overtopped this ridge. Now, if I hover over this, I can see I'm at 1115 feet. Over here, I'm at 1152 feet. Over here, I'm at 1159 feet. So you can see between here and here, what did I say, 1100 and let's say at the top of that ridge, 1140 feet. If I go down here in the nook, 770 feet, right? So on a second. Well, and you've got, it's not perfectly formed, but you've got kind of a double cataract there with a blade rock. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Uh, are you talking about this right here? This feature? Um, just to the south of that. This? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, yeah, you can see you've got, actually you had two flows coming through here. So what'd I say here? You got, uh, let's say 1100 and say 1100 and say 1150 feet. And then at the trough here, you've got 600 feet. Um, so that's the difference of 550 feet. So let's think about, excuse me, let's think about what this is implying here. First of all, the water, which is here, 300 feet, and here is 1000 feet. So the water had to rise between seven and 800 feet to overtop this rim, this ridge. You got that? Unless. There could have been a kind of a deep valley there already, right? That it flowed into. Okay, so then, yeah, so here's the question, and this is the same question that is raised when we're back there at Wallula Gap at the, uh, at the Twin Sisters. How much was the floor of the, of the gorge deepened by the floods? Right. Uh, so it, in my opinion, if I had to guess, I would say that the, the Wallula Gap is probably going to be deeper. The reason is, I mean, uh, it's going to be deeper down cutting because you had sort of that Venturi flume effect where all of this water is coming in from multiple directions and backing up in Pasco Basin, right? And, and you can actually look on some of the maps, you can almost see the, the huge, uh, vortex whirlpools carved into the landscape, particularly on the north, uh, east side of the gap. Okay, so then let's say, let's say the floor, the, the, the channel here was down cut by a couple of hundred feet. Well, it still means that the water had to, so if right now it's at 296, so if it was cut down a couple of hundred feet, that would mean that, that the elevation pre-flood would have been about 500 feet. Right. And then we zoom in here and we are at like, say, 1150 feet, 1178, we're almost getting up to 12 feet, but to be conserved, we'll say 1150 feet. And so it's, so if that's 1150 feet and then this is, uh, say 500 feet, then you're talking about a water depth of minimum of 650 feet in order to overtop this. Now pre-flood, we could assume that there might've been a saddle, a low point here, and that would make sense for it to exploit that, but undoubtedly if we, you know, it's not going to be, like I said here, this is at five, five 90, and this is at 1109, say 1150 minus 590, that's 560, over 500 feet. It's been lower here than it is on either side. So it's likely that three to 400 feet anyway of material was cut away. So now let's envision how that process would work. This is not going to be, is this going to be a normal river flood? Well, let's think about this. What's happening here is this, look at this. This is a fan delta, right? Can you see the, the delta right here? Yeah, there's two of them, right? There's one there and one to the upper left of it. Uh, this? A little far, a little, a little more to the left, like up and left right there. Oh, there. Yeah. Isn't that another one? Yeah. Yeah. Cause look, look, you got this coming down here. Yeah. And you got this one coming down here. So there's a lot of material that got removed in cutting this. Now, when this fan delta, okay, so here's what I'm getting at. If this is, if this water has risen by, let's just round numbers, 600 feet to overtop this ridge. Well, that would mean that the water in here had risen 600 feet as well. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? Unless there's something blocking the backflow. No, I see what you're saying. Yeah. If the water in the main river had risen that much, then it should back flood into there that much as well. That's right. Yeah. Okay. So now this is a 773 feet. We're getting down here to there's 615 feet. Okay. This is, yeah. So 615 feet and this is 1100 and say 1150, 1150 minus 615. So that's 530 feet lower than this. Yeah. So here's what I'm wondering. If this was a normal river flood, by the time this water into Columbia had risen high enough to spill over the ridge, well, the water here would have been just as high, basically. Right. So how did it make those deltas? You know, why was it cutting through it when it was just meeting water on the other side at the same height? Yeah. Well, so that river wasn't there. Well, okay. Or, or it was here. It wasn't as deep, but what that's suggesting to me is that, and you see how it's right at the beginning of this bend. Yeah. Right where the water is going to be starting to hit that wall. So what this is suggesting to me is that this flood came on as a flash flood, overtop this ridge before the water could back up. Hmm. You've also got possibly stuff coming in from the north there, right? You've got that river creek valleys right there. So if you've got glaciers up in the Cascades, you've got meltwater not necessarily only coming down the river. You've got it coming from the north there, too, and joining that valley. Go back and look at the maps, the map view. Yeah, you can see the two deltas, one here and one here, and they're both associated with the splitting of this flow around this rock, this outcrop right here. So if it was the front end of a flash flood, it would have been carrying all kinds of crap. So maybe a lot of that material in the deltas is the stuff it was carrying as well as what it cut there. Well, remember now, when you've got a flood and this flow of water, you're going to have a bed load that's going to be your really big stuff, and that's going to be flowing along at the bottom of the flow. And then as you get to the top, unless you've got, you know, saltation is the property, is the process whereby a large piece of sediment, like a boulder or whatever, kind of hops along the bottom. Yeah. Right? It's not actually float. It's not floating in there. I mean, if you get enough water and it's moving fast enough, it will actually carry the sediment, large sediment. Yeah, the stuff at the high end would be the fines, right? The high end would be the fines. That's exactly right. That's exactly it. So I'm wondering and thinking that we tried to get up in here to do some exploring, as I recall, Brad, but there were no roads up in here. Is that right? You need to speed up. Yeah, there's not a road up the river. You see that Albert Felipe Park there? That's how far we got, right? Yeah, I think it's kind of a dead end there from that lower side. Going to put a Zodiac in. Do what? You know, put an inflatable boat. Oh, oh. I would sure, yeah, I would sure love to get up here and see this from the lower end. Yeah. I really would. What would you learn? What's the question you're trying to answer here? I want to know the differential between the height of the water here. If it came on as a flash flood, it would have spilled over and started, you know, down cutting. But if the water, if the two water levels were at the same level, if the river rose in a normal sort of, even if it was fast, let's say over a period of three or four days, that this river rises five or six hundred feet. That water is going to back flood into here at that same rate. And there's, why would you then have that down cutting? So now here, here's another, was this fan delta when it was deposited, was it deposited underwater? Yeah. See, that's what I'm trying to discern here. I'm trying to get, get my head wrapped around the nature of the water flow that would have overtopped this ridge and cut this channel through here. And if it came up and get some perspective of what people were familiar with, you're showing before the scab lands are north of that, but all the, all the water's got to pass through a Lula Gap to the east of there. Here. And then go down the Columbia. Yeah. Right there. So, so the other, the other possibility is that it got like a temporary damming from icebergs and whatever, just slightly downstream at that point, just enough to make it overtop while the water level was lower beyond that temporary dam. Well, that's certainly a possibility, I think, without having thought about it too much. Logs and ice and just boulders damming up somewhere. Mm-hmm. Well, it seems to me that this could be explained by an onset of a, basically a very large flash flood coming down, spilling over here and rapidly down cutting this before the water even could back up to that level, to that distance. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Let's see here. If I go just as the crow flies, how far does it have to go here from here? Yeah, it would be an anastomosing flood, flash flood. Yeah. So. A distributary. Mm-hmm. So what do you got, 18 miles there? It was about 10 miles. Well, it was down and back. It was like nine miles. Oh, okay. Nine miles. Yeah, and that certainly doesn't look like a vineyard there. It's all dried out. That photo's showing from 2020. So maybe they didn't make a go of it as a business or something because, yeah, it's obviously not growing up in green there. Can't get in there. I'll have to check. Oh, okay. Well, we have some photographs because we did get in there. We got up there in the nook and went through it. Yep. And, yeah, I mean, it's. Well, depending on when they took the photo, a vineyard doesn't have to be very green. Okay. Well, yeah, it just, it doesn't look like anything's growing up there, though. Oh, okay. Barren, dry, brown. Here you can see the, oops. Yeah, we're getting up close to break time, too, if you want to kind of get us to a point here and then come back and talk about those scientific papers you were referencing. Okay, well, let's just bring this over. That was a little bit of an interesting excursion. Show us the whole planet, Randall. Let's get a perspective here. All right. That's most of the planet. All right. So. I think it was American. Get that X there and get that currently running experimental version, get a little more. Oh, yeah. Thank you. There we go. Thank you for that, Brad. All right. This is, I've started looking into these submarine canyons. I suppose you guys have looked into them somewhat as well, haven't you? Yeah. Very fascinating stuff. So there's been a new paper that came out on this feature right here, which is a landslide. Landslide, if you could call it a land. They're calling it a landslide in the literature. And even though it's under the ocean. Right out from Kitty Hawk. Yeah. Here we go. Now, when I brought this up, are you still seeing it? Are you seeing the diagram? We're still looking at Google Earth here. Still looking at Google Earth. We're looking at your browser. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's okay. Then I'll, sorry, guys. So this thing right here, I don't know how to exactly pronounce the name of it. But definitely, then the rest of that ridge. Yeah. That's what happened right there. So look, you can see that if you go here, if you start here and you're looking at this, this is the edge of the continental shelf. And you can see it's deeply dissected with these gullies all the way through here. Like, you know, why is it dissected like that? Is that water draining off of the shelf? But as you can see, it's got all these gullies. And then you come up here and you get to this thing right here where the gullies get interrupted by this. And this is a massive landslide in here. We'll pick up and talk about that right after the break. All right. Very cool. We'll be right back. Well, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to episode 100 of Cosmographia. Good to be back. Hadn't done a recorded show in quite a while. But let's get into this underwater avalanche or whatever we got going here. Let's do. So in 1980, there was a paper published in the journal Marine Geology, which, by the way, is a really interesting journal. They have some great stuff, particularly on evidence accumulating for tsunamis and gigantic catastrophic storm surges, which is very interesting. Also, turbidites. They have a lot of papers on turbidites and submarine canyons and submarine landslides, which is what this is. So in 1980, there was a paper published in Marine Geology, and it described the first survey of the continental shelf and the continental slope. The word of the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, it was using piston cores and geophysical data. So the authors, Alan R. Bunn and Bonnie A. McGregor, they were the ones who first really described how the seaward edge of that slope, like we just saw on Google Earth, was found to be incised by these steep, dissected scarps. So they comment, and I quote here from their paper, the morphology is consistent with a portion of these sediments having been removed by slumping, because they saw this 500-meter thick, which is 1,640 feet, stratified sedimentary sequence. And they associated it possibly with the James River system. So when we pull Google Earth back up or Google Maps, we'll look at the James River. So they say that the morphology is consistent with a portion of these sediments having been removed by slumping. Post-early Pleistocene is suggested as the possible time of sediment failure. Okay, so they're just kind of stabbing in the dark. Early post-Pleistocene. So given 1980, the Pleistocene, I think at that time, was dated at 1.6 million. It's been extended by a million years to 2.6 million. But I think in 1980, it was still 1.6 million. So early post-Pleistocene could have been a million years ago, right? It could have occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago, or even millions of years. So then there were a series of subsequent studies that attempted to drive a more accurate date, but none of those studies came up with anything definitive. But there was a study that came out in 1986, also in marine geology, that utilized high-resolution survey data, which included deep-toe side-scan sonar, got that deep-toe side-scan sonar, and sub-bottom profiles. And according to the authors of this paper, in 1986 paper, it, quote, permits further consideration of slide geometry, landslide, the geometry of the landslide, the sediments, the ages, and origins. So the author of the paper, David B. Pryor, authors, David B. Pryor, with the Coastal Studies Institute, Louisiana State University, Earl H. Doyle, who was with the Shell Development Company at the time, and Tomei Nurotter, who was with the Department of Oceanography. That's probably not how you pronounce his name. So they concluded from this new survey that the total sediment volume comprising this slump was 128 cubic kilometers of material, which is 30 cubic miles. It's a lot of material, okay? So in the introduction to the paper, they explain, and I quote, a large submarine landslide has been recognized on the Mid-Atlantic Continental Slope in the Curituck Sound offshore region. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. It's spelled C-U-R-R-I-P-U-C-K. Curituck, which is just northeast of Cape. The slide area, it's about 12 miles wide. It begins at about 1,640 feet below the surface of the water, at water depth. It then continues for 12 miles downslope. And at the bottom end of it, the depth of the water is over 6,560 feet. Okay, so you got that. So it starts at the top end of the slump, 1,640 feet. At the bottom of the slump, it's 6,560 feet deep. It's about 12 miles wide and 12 miles long. Okay. Just for a scale there, people might be a little more familiar with Manhattan Island, like 12 miles long. Okay, good. Not 12 miles wide, but 12 miles long. So that's going to be the width of what you were showing there on that undersea image. So in their introduction, the authors are explaining, and I quote, they're referring to studies that were conducted by National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey. And I quote, these studies revealed the presence of a smooth area of the continental slope that appeared to have lost a significant thickness of sediment. The smooth, eroded area is enclosed by an outer rectangular scarp pattern that has an average slope of 12 degrees. A second inner scarp, also rectangular, occurs between 1,400 and 1,800 meters of water depth, which is 4,592 and 5,904 feet of water depth. So the inner scarp system comprises a major head wall and two downslope head walls, and I'm going to show a little graphic here to help people visualize that, what we're talking about. So there's the shelf, and then, like it says, the shelf break, right where it starts shifting from the shelf to the slope, and you've got these two major scarps, or this head wall scarps, kind of rectangular in shape, with side walls and a trough floor, as it says here. So that's basically the diagram of what it looks like. And let's continue on here. I will stop share. Continue the... So then it goes on to say that the slide compact plex was mantled by surface sediment that was between 13 and 30 feet thick. And so what they then did was with this surface sediment that was on top of the slide, they assumed that this was the sediment that had accumulated post-landslide, after the landslide was over, right? So they looked at published deposition rates and concluded, quote, the slides are late pleistocene in age, and now this is two things that are significant about the... is they learned more about this particular feature. It's gone from early... remember early... late... what was it they... how do you describe it? Early post-pleistocene. Thing. Early post-pleistocene. Post-pleistocene sounds like terminal pleistocene. Yeah, sounds like after, yeah. After it started, I think it's younger drives. That's what it meant. It does sound like that. And the very first time I read the paper, it confused me for a moment, but then I realized, okay, they're talking about... Post-onset. Yeah, right after the beginning, yeah. Right. Uh-huh. So now this new study is saying, and here's the quote, the slides are late pleistocene in age and are perhaps associated with rapid deposition. So two interesting clues there. Late pleistocene in age and rapid deposition around the ancestral James and Roanoke River Delta located on the outer shelf and upper slope during a period of lowered sea level. Okay. So in other words, the formation of the slide feature appears to have been far more recent than earlier estimates and as well, uh, potentially catastrophic. So the final, uh, concluding statement by the authors, and I quote, the giant, the general late Pleistocene age of the slide complex raises the possibility that its activity was related to rapid sedimentation on the slope by ancestral James and Roanoke River deltas. The latter are believed to have been located at the shelf edge during a period of lowered sea level. Similar, similar types of slope instability features are known from ancient shelf edge deltas elsewhere. Okay, so now a new study dated, uh, 2023, came out August 1st. The title of this new paper that just came out, also in marine geology, is Late Pleistocene-Holocene Age and Stratigraphy of the Currituck Slide Complex U.S. Mid-Atlantic Continental Slope Implications for Landslide Triggering. Okay, so, uh, paper is authored by Jason D. Chator, uh, URI S. Tenbrink, and Christopher D.P. Baxter, uh, with the Geological Survey and the University of Rhode Island. So they open their introduction with this, quote, Considerable effort has been made recently to identify patterns in submarine landslide timing and to link these events to changes in local and global-scale environmental conditions. The difficulty of dating submarine landslides has hampered efforts to identify statistically significant patterns and correlate them with driving mechanisms such as rapid change in sea level and global climate. Without a well-supported understanding of the conditions that lead to and trigger seafloor instability, our ability to assess future landslides and tsunami generation potential remains limited. So they then refer to an earlier paper that came out in 2009, and it turns out in this earlier paper they did a more precise estimate of the total volume of the complex, and they point out that the adjusted volume has been upped to approximately 160 cubic kilometers, or 38 cubic miles, which is a 33% increase over the previous estimate. So now you're up to 38 cubic miles of material. Go on and visualize one cubic mile of material, and that's a lot of material. 38 cubic miles, that's a big landslide. So they refer to the large event, the volume of the large event, the headwall depth, and the proximity to the coast as defining the Currituck slide complex as a benchmark source for modeling. However, quote, the age of the most recent events were only constrained by timing based upon regional sedimentation rates. So the lack of precision left estimates of the age ranging from 25,900 years to 46,800 years. Um, but now in this paper, they do the first radiocarbon dating for the failure, and what happens? The dating centers around the period of 14,500 years ago, which of course is within the error bar of meltwater pulse 1A. This leads the authors to infer, I quote, the coincidence of the failure of timing with shifts in global climate and resultant increase in glacial meltwater through multiple eastern U.S. terrestrial river system pathways to the continental margin is explored as a driver for failure of the Currituck shelf edge delta. So, what do I conclude from that? What would you conclude from that? Well, I would point out again that the dating of the centers around the period 14,500 years ago, what else has that date? Anybody? Just said it. 14,500 years ago? Yes. Is that what meltwater pulse 1A? You got it. So, could there be an association between the formation of this 38-mile, cubic-mile mass of material slumping down the continental slope and meltwater pulse 1A? How much closer was the coastline to that area? Well, then that's the question. That's the question, isn't it? So... So, it was 1,600 feet. What's the depth right there at the edge at the top? Well, let's see if Google Earth will give me that. Okay, right there at the top is minus 228 feet. Okay, so... If the sea level was 300 or 400 feet down, it should have been all the way out there. Right. Yeah. So... So, the collapse happens at that time and then the sea comes over. So, it wasn't a submarine landslide. Well, it was probably... I'm guessing... Let's see here. Oh, you said it was like 1,600 feet down. Yeah, so... So, it would have been just... So, it crashed into the ocean. So, it would have been a flank failure at that time. Right. It would have started like I'm scanning over the head wall right now. The head of it is showing it at minus... Right at minus 2,000 feet. Here, let's go back to the share screen so you can see what I'm doing here. All right. So, you see my cursor? Yeah. So, that would have been above... That would have been land. Dry land. That would have been land. But the actual avalanche happened just under the water down there. Yeah. Right here. It drops off steeply. Right here. Yeah, this would have been the coastline. Right here. Okay. Right along there. Yeah. Now, it may not have been exactly the coastline depending on the... The size of the delta. The delta, but I'm thinking about the forebulge. Because once you get outside the perimeter of the glaciers, the land sort of rides up. Bulges up upwards. Yeah. Yeah. But in either case, yeah, this would have been close to the shoreline right here at the coast. So, during the Ice Age, these two rivers here would have flowed right out across the shelf. What are those three little pyramids to the south? Yeah, we were looking at those earlier. We need to know what those are. Where? Just zoom in. A little triangle there. Yeah, there's a triangle of triangles down there. Yeah, there's three pyramids right there. Yeah. Oh, that? Yeah. That's where Atlantis is, Randall. That's... Maybe we've got something there. This is cool. Because, hey, that would have been... There we go. Well, let's see. Yeah. That's at like 200... So, that would have been about 100 feet above sea level. Yeah. Yeah. Mystery solved. Okay. Well, let's go back to this. This was... If this was a river delta, it's crazy to me how you just... It's completely obscured the canyon of that river. I mean, it's just been flattened. Yeah. Well, for one thing, think about the highly energetic surf rising up 400 feet across this shelf here. It would have been... It's not like a single event. I mean, it would have been surf and surf fills everything up with sand. Moving slowly all the way up inland. So, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it would have taken 5,000 years to reach from here to here. Okay. However, within that 5,000 years... What, what, what, what? Well, I'm looking at the canyon just to the north. That's an interesting... Yeah, there's actually coming down the Potomac there. Oh. Yeah, there's a bunch of them. Yeah. So, what are creating these then in the... After this... Or did they just not get filled in? I mean, this is just... I love this stuff. I don't understand it. Canyon gear restricted area. Oh, you can't go there. Hey. Yeah, so I was thinking, yeah, we'll hike down there on our next tour. But that blows that. Yeah. Well, why would it be restricted? What do you mean restricted? Restricted for what? A marine protected area. Must be no fishing. Probably no fishing. Probably. No splashing or diving either. Probably. So, let's see. How deep is that? Whoa. Okay, so that canyon right there is over 1,500 feet deep. Wow. Right there. That's... So, you think it just didn't get filled in or is this something that... Like, it didn't get filled in by the surf as it moved inland or it was some flow... I don't understand that. Yeah, because here's another one. Yeah, they're all along that shelf. You can find them all over. So, that's why I was surprised that this other thing is like a river valley, but it's just nothing. You can't see it at all. Well, I mean, look at here. From right here, you know, it's minus 200 and, say, 20. If I pull this out, okay, from here to the shelf, 10, 11 miles. So, in 10, say, in 10 miles, it goes from 287... I'm going to get this in my calculator here. 287 feet to... Zoom in here so I can... There's 2,300 feet. So, that... Right there, it's 2,000 feet deep. So, it's been downcut 2,000 feet within less... Within about 10 miles. Yeah, but the fact that that feature continues all the way down the shelf, which would have been underwater even when the sea levels were lower, I mean... I'm thinking it had to have been a tsunami, maybe. Because, you know, in a tsunami, you know, the water retracts and would have temporarily exposed the shelf here, perhaps, and then it would have... Crazy. Yeah. It would have been crazy. Okay, so... Sorry, we distracted you. Back to the landslide. I'm just blown away that the river valley is completely obscured. That's just... Yeah. Okay, so... So, a massive amount of water coming down those two rivers when the shelf was... when the coast was still way out there because the sea level was down. The water and all the materials dumping into the ocean there and it causes a buildup along the shelf and then a landslide. That's the idea. And it looks like it happened with pretty much right around meltwater pulse 1A. Meltwater pulse 1A. Yeah. So... Which kind of leads me to think now more and more depending on the dating and I've got to... You know, I've got to convince myself that the dating is very accurate but let's... Just for the sake of argument to assume that it is then I think I'll use the word tripartite. I think we're looking at a tripartite ending of the Pleistocene which would be meltwater pulse 1A 14.5 14.6 somewhere right in there the lower younger driest boundary at 12.9 and the upper younger driest boundary at 11.6 which would be meltwater pulse 1B. It looks like there was like three catastrophes. Boom, boom, boom. And it took three to pretty much kick the planet out of the depths of the ice age. Anyways, this is a very interesting feature and it's... That's what... It's just fascinating because the, you know, the whole comet research the younger driest impact hypothesis is not associated with one of the meltwater pulses. That's basically what you just said, right? The pulses are at the at 14.9 or whatever and then at the end of the younger driest not the start of it. Right. So those... If it was an airburst or a bunch of impacts or some kind of bombardment it didn't cause a meltwater pulse or at least not one that's been identified? Well, not a meltwater pulse in a rapid sea level rise. However, the catastrophic draining of Lake Agassi is associated exactly with the lower younger driest boundary and that includes the draining through the Minnesota River Valley on the south end and the McKenzie River Valley on the north into the Arctic Ocean. That was one of the things that stuck with me from the Cosmic Summit when Mark Young was presenting and he went through four or five misconceptions and one of them that was that sea level only rose about six feet there at 12.8, 12.9 whenever that whatever lined up with the impact dating there was not a simultaneous sea level rise more than six feet. But I mean six feet is considered like beyond catastrophic today. Two inches or something right? It's like that's catastrophic. Sure. Definitely would be the end of civilization as we know it. Yeah, so look at this vantage point of these two canyons. and look how far it extends out. Let's see I'm out at a depth of 7,600 feet below sea level here and it's still a continuation. You wouldn't think it would continue at the bottom of 6,000 feet of water to dig a canyon. Well, yeah. I think it'd have to be exposed to do that work. You can see this one continues on down. This is 8,000 minus 8,000 feet. Yeah, curious. There's a lot we've still got to figure out about this planet we're on. Yeah, I mean, could that be about hides or currents or I don't know where people have asked these questions. Haven't started up the GoFundMe for the submarine yet. And then I got a too soon joke about that. No jokes about that. But yeah, this is I love this stuff. I hope there's more of this. This is fascinating stuff to me. Oh, good. Because it's certainly fascinating stuff to me. Here's a let's look at this. What about you, Mike? No, Mike doesn't find this. This is not interesting. No, I do find all that undersea stuff fascinating. But I look at the canyons and I think, you know, are they old river mouths, you know, or? Yeah, but let's assume, I mean, for the sake of argument, if that's what you're saying, does it, I mean, are you suggesting that the sea was down at that level? 6,000 feet lower? Or? Up. Well, yeah, alternatively, right. Right. I don't know what I'm suggesting. I'm just asking, just curious. I don't know what those things mean. Like Kyle, I'm fascinated by it, but I don't have any answers. I have questions. Well, damn it, Mike! Could it be from, I listen to you, Randall? What? Could it be from the answers? Like fractures, like sort of earthquake-type fractures in the ground that then cause that canyon to sort of just collapse in on a giant crack? like they're like evenly spaced. Yeah, I don't know, but okay, can you see this graphic? Yeah. Here, he's defined, this is in a way, but you can see this is what we were just looking at. These two, and then there's a couple more up here. Look at this Wilmington, and you notice, are these two, what is this, Baltimore Canyon and Wilmington Canyon, are they associated with Delaware Bay? Yeah. And then you can see here's Chesapeake Bay, here's the Roanoke River, Albemarle Sound, and here's your, the slide, the Currituck slide complex marked out in the yellow here. Wow, look at how far it goes. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you didn't see that, you couldn't see it because of the, the, the resolution only went out to like, oops, to about here. But yeah, it kept going. And I look at that plane, I think, you know, I wonder how much silt is there and what is that silt covering? You know, it's. Well, it didn't cover up those pyramids that we saw. Those are still there. Well, it may be buried the first, you know, five or 600 feet of them and it's only the apex of the pyramids. So the pyramids stick it out. Where are the areas of the Heinrich events? They're up on the shelf, right? They're not off the side of the cliff. Well, okay, let's go back to the four bulge idea. So what we need to do is map where I don't think the edge of the perimeter of the ice sheet was and then how far beyond the ice sheet would the land be tilted upwards and how much would it be tilted upwards? I wonder if anybody's taken that into account when trying to consider the origin of submarine canyons. I don't know, but that's something now I'm going to have to look into. So, it's very possible that there was gigantic currents gushing off of the continent discharging from the Laurentide ice sheet. Sure. Well, let's see. Okay, I've got that already. We've seen. So let's move on since we're talking about Hey, this is so Russ is just bringing up this point like if like how freshwater can sort of stay fresh for a while when it when it interests to see well, if it was really cold water rushing into the ocean that was could have been much warmer, it may have stayed down low in the bottom and and kept it maintained a flow kind of yeah. But see Russ what you're you're getting at right there. I mean that's part of the whole explanation for turbidity currents is is is water stratification and and a lower denser flow of water which could either be because of temperature or sediment load. Oh yeah, there you go. Like a yes makes it much heavy and dense. Yeah. So I would definitely think that's part of it. Yeah, flows along and cuts like it would maybe not as strong, but yeah, it can cut. But there we run into the problem again of competency, which is how much sediment can the water flow? Yeah. Hairy before it's saturated. Yeah. And then it can't carry anymore. So you guys will like this. Here we go. So in the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Spain, do we know how to pronounce this? The Balearic Islands? Is that how you say it? Balearic? Balearic. Balearic. That's off the east coast of Spain in the Mediterranean. So earlier this year, there was a study that came out and it reports on finding evidence for really big waves striking the islands at some time in the past. So the evidence for the occurrence of these huge waves is in the form of deposits of huge boulders located along on the coast lines and on clifftops adjacent to the sea. So the question regarding the origin of these waves is whether they are produced by tsunamis or by powerful storm surges. So there are five authors. What's that, Kyle? Or by like rocks from space. By rocks from space, yes. That's the other, that's the third option. I mean, I guess technically it would be a tsunami, but I'm thinking of like, you know, a splash. Well, I mean, a splash into the oceans of a bolide, it certainly is fully capable of generating a very large energetic tsunami. Yeah. So there's five authors of this study. the study is entitled Storm or Tsunamis? Boulder deposits on the coasts of the Balearic Islands, Spain. Also marine geology. You can tell I've been reading marine geology recently. So they say the five authors who are geographers, biologists, and earth scientists who are from the Balearic Islands and from Spain. So this is the, their conclusions is that tsunami simulations from submarine earthquakes on the North African coasts predict the impact of tsunami waves on the Balearic Islands. Large coastal boulders of the Balearic Islands are located in the exact places numerical models predict they will be. So they began to look at historical tsunamis to try to come up with some reasonable understanding of when these boulders were deposited. So there was this, the last time there was a really big tsunami that hit these islands was in the year 1756. And it had a run up, a run in, a run in is laterally, a run up is, you know, vertically. So obviously if the land is steeper, the run in is not going to be as far as if the land is shallow, then the water can run in much inland much further. Makes sense, right? Okay, so you've got your run in, which is your horizontal across the land, and your run up is what's the highest elevation above sea level that the tsunami reached, okay? So that's the difference between run in and run up. So the run up elevation was up to measured as high as 148 feet above sea level. The run in was about 1.2 miles from the coast. So that was a hell of a tsunami. Since regional record keeping began 60 years ago, no event has affected the boulder deposits that were the subject of this study. In that interval, since 1756, the highest storm wave reached in February of 2020 was at Menorca as a result of the storm Gloria, and it reached 47 feet. So that was the highest wave height. And that storm had no effect on the boulder deposits that were the subject of this paper. Okay? So 47 feet as compared to 148 feet. So the 1756 tsunami was 100 feet higher than the 2020 tsunami. So I'm going to quote from their paper now. There are numerous places throughout the world where the rocky coasts are highly populated, especially in areas where beach tourism is the main economic activity. Thus it is important to know the coastal risks to which these areas are subject. In areas of such small islands where continental risks, landslides, or floods associated with small water courses are small, there are three main littoral risks. L-i-t-o-r-a-l. Would you look that up for us, Kyle? L-i-t-t-o-r-a-l. L-i-t-o-r-a-l. O-r-a-l. Littoral risks. The three main littoral risks. Of or on a shore, especially a seashore. Okay, there we go. So there's three main littoral risks. Sea level rise, tsunamis, or major storms. As the main goal of this article, we will focus on differentiation of the geomorphological and stratigraphic signature left by storms or tsunamis on the Balaric Islands. The main stratigraphic evidence of the action of very, very energetic waves on the coast of these islands is the presence of cliff-top boulders. There is lively, wide debate worldwide about the origin of large boulders located on the edges of cliffs. There are direct observations of emplacement of large boulders in Australia by a tsunami wave and also direct observations of displacement of large boulders in Ireland by storm waves. Apart from direct observations, it is difficult to distinguish between storms and tsunamis as the genesis of coastal boulders. Coastal accumulation of large boulders on rocky coasts related to tsunamis have been described from around the world, in Australia, in Japan, in the Caribbean Islands, and in the central Mediterranean, as well as many other places. But with respect to this particular study, they say that large cliff-top boulders of tsunami origin have been described throughout the Mediterranean. From east to west, tsunami boulders have been interpreted in Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, on the Apulian coast, and the coast of Sicily, and Malta. The focus of this research was the island of Menorca, where there are three large boulder fields. And what we'll do is I'm going to pull back up. Real quick, that word is actually pronounced literal. Literal. Like literal, it's literally pronounced literal? Yes, literal. Okay. Let's, uh, let us go to Google Maps, and I'm going to zoom over so people can see the islands we're talking about here. And there we go. Okay. They're saying that they're imprecate, too, these boulders. Yeah, I'm going to show you a picture of them in a second here. Okay. Stole the thunder. Oh, sorry. You could have gotten an ad. I just pulled up the abstract, and you'd have just said it when you saw the picture. All right, so there you go. He would have given me the credit. He would have said, great job, Kyle. The Balearic Islands. And so the one, the one we're looking at in this study is this island up here. This one, Menorca. Okay. But all of the islands have this on them, have these kinds of deposits on them. Um, so let's go back. That's within the Mediterranean. Yes, that's within the Mediterranean. Um, that's right. So, between, get this, between the years 1365 and 2023, at least 17 tsunamis have been cataloged in the western Mediterranean. It is believed that the majority of these resulted from large historical earthquakes offshore of the Algerian coast in North Africa. um, and now here's a comment from me. So, from what we have witnessed in recent decades, particularly with the two big tsunamis of the 21st century that we've experienced, um, and what the geological record tells us is that massive tsunamis, I believe, are an underrated hazard. We can add tsunamis to the list of potential large scale disasters resulting from volcanic eruptions, asteroid and comet impacts, uh, still unexplained natural climatic convulsions, powerful seismic events, coronal mass ejections, and solar storms. None of these, you'll note, are anthropogenic in origin. So, it's important to keep in mind that in the public discourse around these kinds of, uh, subjects, all of this stuff tends to be ignored while all of the emphasis is on anthropogenic climate change. Uh, but let's take a look here, uh, at what you were talking about there, Russ. Check this out. Instantly recognizable as imbricated, yeah. Imbrication, yes. Now, check out these other, but now this is one of the boulder deposits, and check out this other one. Oh my God. Now, yes. So, I think we're talking about a very major, yeah, that's, that's, I mean, water that can move that as a, yeah, talking about a huge tsunami. Extraordinarily, extraordinarily large boulders on the southern part of Menorca, the scale of these boulders is a testament to the incredible power of the tsunami waves that emplaced them. And this is why I say, you know, we're discovering these things are all over the planet. An underrated hazard. I think we, it would qualify as. Did you read this part of the abstract where they talk about the numerical models and the predictions? I read it. No, I didn't read it. What do they say? It just says the large coastal boulders are located in the exact places that numerical models predict they would be. Oh, I did read that, yes. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, this would be large undersea earthquakes off the coast of Algeria. They've actually located, there's a fault line there that has had some very big earthquakes. So, the assumption is that the tsunamis were generated from those earthquakes. Where's the source rock of the boulders? Probably ripped up off the shelf, I'm not sure. Yeah, I would assume it's limestone and probably just, yeah, ripped them off the cliff face. Yeah, ripped them off the cliff face. Yeah, so it didn't have to move them far, just picks them up off the cliff face, flips them over. That's what I was wondering, if they were from the seafloor or cliff face or whatever, but cliff face makes sense. I was looking at the map of the island and the southern coastline of that island is very rocky, it just looks like it's just cliffs all along the edge there, and it's, you know, it looks like limestone to me. They weren't rounded off at all or smooth very much, so transported far. Right. No, I wouldn't think they've been transported far, but the fact that they were transported at all. Yeah. Sure. So, yeah, one more thing to add to the list of things that can wipe out humanity. Now, I would guess that probably in that transition, let's say that 3,000 year transition from 11.5 to 14.5 or 11.6 to 14.6, there was probably, you know, I guess you could say a perfect storm of catastrophes. I think we have, that's the kind of the model we have to, you can't just simplify it to one thing. It was a whole series of things that happened. undoubtedly interrelated, of course. But, yeah, I mean, I would think that tsunamis would have been very much a part of that. And think about this, too. If you've got that lowered sea level and you have a tsunami that's, you know, makes landfall and it's 150 feet in elevation, imagine how far it's going to sweep across the continental shelf. Yeah. In fact, you might have a tsunami that could almost reach, you know, its run in could almost be the entire continental shelf. And woe to anything that was living on that shelf at the time, be it human or animal or plant. I mean, any forest, what's going to happen to forests? They're going to be drowned. I mean, because there were forests. We know that, that the forests were growing pretty much over the whole continental shelf. and it was heavily occupied by Pleistocene animals. And I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that, you know, late Pleistocene humans. Clovis, I don't know, was... Yeah. I mean, so far the dating of Clovis suggests that they came after Meltwater Pulse 1A. But where did they come from? It's a stumper, isn't it? But there were pre-Clovis. Yeah, there's pre-Clovis here now. There were pre-Clovis. Now, again, Clovis technically is a lithic style. Yeah. It's not a people. A people. Right. It's not like some genetic group of people or a race of people. It's a... Right. It's a lithic style. Exactly. But who were they? I mean... But who were they? I know. But there were pre-Clovis. Now, was it this... Were they? Yeah. Whose were those arrowheads? But yeah, I mean, there was... I would assume there were people there. One would think. I mean, during the Ice Age, that was probably a pretty good place to live. That's where you'd want to be. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of things to figure out yet. So, um... How much more do we have to get into here? I've got more stuff, but how much do we want to get into? I think it's a good place to stop, for sure. Wind it down, yeah. Yeah. Great episode. I love the underwater stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I love the water stuff, too. Yeah. And, uh... What was that place you were looking at a while back, uh, years ago? But it was... There were, like, splash chevrons, huge, just coming way... Madagascar. Yeah. Madagascar. Gigantic splash chevrons just coming up. Yeah, that's the idea, like, it could be from Burkle, right? The Burkle impact, if there is one there. Yeah. Yep. There's, like, a possible impact in, like, a two-mile deep Indian sea, and it's splashed way up onto the Madagascar, left these huge chevrons, 600 feet high of rubble. 18-mile-wide crater. Yeah, and then there's... You can see the same, uh, patterns on the corresponding coast of Australia, really far away. Right, Western Australia. Yeah. And you can see corresponding patterns on the coast of Africa. Yeah, it's crazy. So it would have just seemed just... You know? It is crazy. Um... Yeah, I mean, I got a whole bunch more stuff like that of things that have been happening that we haven't kept up to speed on, but we've got to do some catch-up here. Now, is that something that's in the newsletter? Just reminding people that that's coming out monthly, uh, first Saturday of every month, and something that you, uh, review and summarize, give commentary on, uh, recent and maybe not so recent scientific papers? Yep. So good stuff, not, not just where and what Randall's doing, but what he's reading and processing in his brain, putting into the big picture he's got. Yep. Randallcarlson.com. You can get, uh, information on the newsletter, trips, obviously the videos and anything else going on with the, with Randall and the team. So make a note of this, Brad, maybe we can pick up with this on our next recorded one. Um, because, you know, talking about the, the submarine stuff and the, the ocean stuff, the next thing I had, um, which we wouldn't have time to go into, but this is, here's the title of the article. This came out in, uh, nature communications. The date on this was pretty recent, uh, 2021. The timing of iceberg scours and massive ice rafting events in the subtropical North Atlantic. Oh, cool. Yeah. And we'll just want, one quick here. High resolution sea floor mapping shows extraordinary evidence that massive up to a thousand feet thick icebergs once drifted more than 5,000 kilometers or 3,000 miles south along the eastern United States. So this is something else now we need to factor in. Man. Rafting events. Yeah. Can you imagine that? Like you're, you're living in the south on the coast. Yeah. And a block of ice. Yeah. Where are the icebergs coming from? Washing up on the coast. So there's numerical glacial iceberg simulations indicate that the transport of icebergs to these sites occurs during massive but short-lived periods of elevated meltwater discharge. There you go, folks. Tune in for the next one. Yeah. Episode 101. And folks, we will continue here at Cosmographia to dedicating ourselves to helping to try to solve these mysteries and reconstruct these episodes, these phenomenal events of our recent past in Earth history and how they may have affected our ancestry and what it portends for our own future. providing more free content. There you go. So, yeah, that's a value to you. Get on patreon.com slash Randall Carlson. Contribution to Randall's research and what we're trying to do here as a group and a team. Yeah. Tolerate the commercials, if you would, on YouTube. All right, guys. I enjoyed it. It was great. A lot of fun to do this again. Yeah. Yep. All right. All right. Thanks, everybody. Yeah. Thanks, folks. See you next time. Thanks, y'all. Yeah. Good night. Good night. Six months from now, Mike. Yeah. Jesus, get off my back. When we know, we'll send you a letter by snail field. All right. I'll send you a pigeon. Yeah, I'll send you a pigeon.