Earthtalk

Here is a classic example of how a scientist with a revolutionary idea was ridiculed by his peers for nearly 3 decades but eventually proven correct.  The geologic community at that time refused to believe his "radical" explanation for what he had been mapping in eastern Washington.  In 1923 J. Harlen Bretz, a University of Chicago geologist, published his first 2 papers on the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.  His detractors were viscous in their criticisms since Bretz was proposing the Scablands were formed by a gigantic flood and not by glaciers as was the popular notion at the time.  He was proposing a catastrophic event had occurred at a time when geologists had replaced the idea of “catastrophism” to explain geologic processes with the more believable principle of “uniformitarianism”. 

    Bretz continued his research through the 1920's and 30's undeterred by the nay-sayers, many of whom were the leading geologists of their time. As the years passed opponents found it increasingly difficult to explain away his evidence that a gigantic flood (eventually the number increase to 24 flood events) swept across eastern Washington, scouring out broad, deep channels called coulees in what was a split second of geologic time.  The coulees were far too large (several hundred feet deep in some cases and over a mile wide), to have been carved by the tiny streams flowing through them.  He mapped deposits of sands and boulder gravels at elevations too high for any modern-sized stream or normal-sized glacial meltwater stream to have deposited.  There was plenty of additional evidence piling up that I will not describe but Bretz had one huge problem, he had no idea where the water came from!

    During that same period, another prominent geologist, Joseph Pardee, was mapping glacial lake deposits and shorelines in western Montana.  When he heard Bretz describe his flood hypothesis at a conference he knew instantly where the water came from, his Glacial Lake Missoula.  He estimated the lake to have been about half the size of Lake Michigan and nearly 2000 feet deep at the glacial dam that blocked the Clark Fork River east of Spokane Washington, easily large enough to at least once to have burst through the glacial dam and pour across Washington. He did not share this information with Bretz at first, waiting until he had completed his own research on the lake.  Eventually they did collaborate and Bretz finally had his water source and the rest is history.  It is now recognized as the largest known flood in earth history and is still being studied.  At its peak, the largest of the floods, the Bretz Flood, discharged water at 45 mph and volumes that were ten times greater than the combined flow of all the rivers on earth!  The flow was so great that it could not readily flow through Wallula Gap along the present Columbia River even though the gap is several thousand feet deep and over a mile across.  A huge lake formed above the gap as the flood waters poured through at reduced rates.  Sediments deposited in this lake were shown in the 1970's  to represent at least 24 individual flood events. 

    My point in this example is that it illustrates well how science works.  With perseverance, sound hypotheses will eventually be accepted as fact even in the face of strong opposition.  Bretz had the data and was not prevented from publishing it and turned out to be proven correct by hundreds of geologists since his last published work in 1959.  Beliefs based on faith are not science and can never be proven or disproved and have no place in a serious, factual-based conversations on the origins of the universe, earth, global warming, or life.  By-the-way, the great Missoula Flood story offers no support for the idea of Noah’s flood.  There is zero scientific evidence for Noah’s flood and by now some latter day Bretz certainly would have found it if it existed, after all, it supposedly covered the entire earth.