| Welcome to a photo tour of one of the most geologically unique places in the world. Last July, 17 teachers joined planetary scientists and educators on a three-day trip to the Channeled Scablands of central Washington.
The journey was the first part of a weeklong workshop examining the region's unique Mars-like landscape and its relationship to the latest research on the Red Planet. The group then returned to the University of Washington where used their new knowledge to develop hands-on activities for their classrooms. |
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| UW Professor Tony Irving describes how Ice Age glaciers whose debris is still found east of Wenachee swept down from Canada. |
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| Dry Falls, the skeleton of one of the greatest waterfalls in geologic history, is three and a half miles wide. The falls was caused by the collapse of an enormous ice dam which held back the waters of an Ice Age lake then covering a large part of northwestern Montana. |
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| In the 1920s, J. Harlen Bretz advanced the theory that cataclysmic floods carved out the dramatic features of the Scablands in days and weeks rather than centuries. However, the scientific community refused to accept his theory for more than 40 years. |
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At the peak of the Ice Age, a glacier moved south out of Canada, damming rivers and creating Glacial Lake Missoula, which covered much of Western Montana. Eventually, the waters broke through the dam sending the entire contents of the lake flooding across northern Idaho and into eastern Washington. |
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| In the Ephreta fan area, the water that shot through the Grand Coulee spread out and slowed dropping the large boulders. This example is about 20 feet tall, and was carried intact at least a few miles from its original source. Some of the granite boulders, up to 8 or so feet long, must have been carried much farther.
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| Professor Irving shovels away "slackwater deposits," the fine-grained sediments left by the floodwaters away from the main channels. Each of pair of layers (coarser and finer) are believed to represent a single flood event. An outcrop like this would record many many individual catastrophic floods. |
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| Looking at the Columbia River gorge from above Crescent Bar, you can see that the canyon wall in the center is composed of horizontal layers. These are the lava flows of the Columbia River basalts which erupted about 14 million years ago. The tan grassy plain on the right is the top of a gravel bar that was deposited by the giant floods. The undulations on the plain's surface are giant current ripples, more than 100 meters from crest to crest. |
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| Pillow lava near Vantage, Wash., was created when lava flowed into a lake. The hot basalt lava reacted with the lake water producing orange-brown palagonite. |
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| In 1995, more than 60 engineers, scientists and educators gathered in the Scablands to compare the landscape created by the catastrophic Ice Age floods with the larger Mars flood channel, Ares Vallis.
Mission planners for Mars Pathfinder had speculated that the Sojourner rover might need to move among rocks like those seen in the Ephrata area, says Dr. Allen Treiman of NASA's Lunar and Planetary Institute. ("As it turned out the Mars Pathfinder landing site did not have rocks anywhere near as big as this.") |
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| The sand dune by Dodson's Creek, southwest of Ephrata, shows formations created by wind. They are analogous to the formations on the slopes of Mars' craters. |
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| These giant columns in the Roza basalt flow at Frenchman's Coulee resisted erosion by the flood waters of the Scablands 15,000 years ago. |
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| Mars Geology participants enjoy their last night together at the workshop banquet on the University of Washington campus. |
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