Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The Mystery of the Megaflood

The movie started off talking about scientist stumped by the Channeled Scablands. None of the knew why they looked the way they did or how they were formed. They thought that it may have happened because of erosion. There were boulders scattered throughout the Scablands and they thought that there was no way the normal river processing could have moved the boulders. They came to the conclusion that ice was the only way that the boulders could have been moved. One scientist claimed that it was not formed by evolution or erosion, it was a catastrophe that essentially happened over night. The people didn't believe him because it was too "unbelievable". They did research and finally decided that he wasn't wrong.

They discovered through experiments that Glacial Lake Mizzoula was the reason for the scablands. The water in the glacier would travel through small cracks and eventually melted the glacier causing an explosion of the glacier. The water traveled through the scablands just carving the landscape. The pressure of the water from the glacier carried the boulders around. The water pressure also cause ripples on the floor of the scablands, which scientists were perplexed by.

No comments:

Post a Comment