One of the most remarkable geological provinces in the world is found in the eastern part of Washington state, USA. The Channeled Scablands were formed by a series of floods of tremendous mangitude, resulting from the failure of a 1/4-mile-high ice dam that held back a lake in western Montana during the Ice Ages (18,000 to 13,000 years before the present). The "Missoula Floods" sent torrents coursing across Washington with discharge rates as high as 20 million cubic feet per second. The water reached depths as high as 250 meters, and speeds as high as 30 meters per second (68 mph). The resulting terrain is characterized by coulees (dry valleys), giant gravel bars, giant current ripples, hanging valleys, "scabland terrain" riddled with potholes, and other features.
The definitive book on this region is "The Channeled Scabland," a collection of chapters edited by Victor R. Baker and Dag Nummedal (Dr. Baker also wrote approximately half the book). It was originally compiled as a guidebook for a 1978 NASA conference to discuss similarities between the Missoula Floods and giant floods on Mars. I have been informed by Dr. Baker that the book is out of print and not under copyright, so that duplicating it in any form is acceptable.
Someone by the name of Bob Kobres has helpfully scanned the entire book, using a viewing program by the name of DjVu. You will need to download DjVu in order to view his files. Here is a link to Mr. Kobres' original page, which has a helpful format with page-by-page thumbnails. He also has a plain text version and a text search engine. As a backup, you can also find the DJV files here. For more convenient viewing and printing, I have converted the DjVu files to JPEGs (JPG files available here) and have also re-scanned the cover and the color pages (GIF files available here). Finally, I have combined these into a regular Acrobat PDF file. You can download the PDF version here, but be warned that it is 126 MB.
LPL Field Trip to the Channeled Scablands, September 2002
