A public-facing companion to the Ice Age Floods Institute — integrating decades of IAFI scholarship with immersive 360° field capture, drone photography, and photogrammetry across four states.
The Ice Age Floods Institute has spent decades assembling the scholarship of the floods. This site is the immersive public front door for that work — surfaced to a national audience for the first time, with the 360° and photogrammetry layer IAFI’s existing platforms can’t host.
The official immersive public trail experience for the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.
Storytelling, trip planning, deep site profiles, and an interactive map — built on top of IAFI’s data, fully attributed, with the immersive 360° / drone / photogrammetry capture layer added on by Terrain360.
Not a replacement for iceagefloods.org or iafi.org.
IAFI carries on as the scholarly authority, the membership organization, and the chapter network. This site funnels public traffic to IAFI — new members, new donors, new field-trip attendees — not away from it.
Live interactive map with cinematic flood reconstruction, 3D water-extent timeline, before/after split view, and direct entry into every captured site. Powered by Terrain360.
iceagefloodstrail.org/map/ with 301 redirect once Phase 1 commits
The Trail Map isn’t a pin-on-a-Google-map demo — it’s a custom 3D experience with a cinematic flood reconstruction, layered geologic data, and over 2,500 indexed data points sourced from IAFI, USGS, and four state geological surveys.
An east-to-west camera sequence retraces the floodpath from the ice dam breach to the Pacific. Auto-plays on first visit; can be replayed anytime.
A timeline slider reconstructs the water’s extent hour-by-hour after the dam failed. The flood literally fills the landscape on the map.
A draggable split view shows the same place as it looks today and as it looked under 500 cubic miles of water. Slide to compare.
Six animated cards put the flood’s scale into reference frames: ten Mississippis, fifty Niagaras, a wall of water taller than the Space Needle.
Five collapsible layer groups, eleven data layers, and filters by data type, state, and route type. Find any of the 103 sites or 1,860 IAFI field locations.
Bottom-sheet panels, GPU-tier detection, lazy-loaded layers, and a help button that explains the timeline and split view to first-time visitors.
From the Blackfoot River in Montana — the flood source — to the Columbia Gorge, the Channeled Scablands, and Palouse Falls, captures are already published on Terrain360. Phase 1 expands the program into the full four-state trail.
Five hundred immersive scenes wrapping the Dry Falls plunge basin — the world’s largest dry waterfall, four times the width of Niagara.
View profile →Eleven miles along the Blackfoot River corridor in the heart of Glacial Lake Missoula territory — the lake whose 2,000-foot ice dam, when it failed, became the floods themselves.
Open in Terrain360 →Phase 1 spans four capture types, delivered in open formats that work in ArcGIS Online, Esri StoryMaps, Google Earth, Mapbox, and any modern web platform. The assets are yours — not locked to Terrain360.
Walkable trails and shoreline corridors captured scene-by-scene at GPS-accurate locations. Hotspot overlays link to interpretive content. Used for hikes, drive routes, paddle corridors, and overlook sequences.
For sites that can’t be walked or boated — Burlingame Canyon, Pantops, Williams Lake Cataract, Benton City Scablands, The Narrows — drone delivers the only practical way to capture the geometry of catastrophe from above.
Erratics, small point-locations, and signature geologic features captured as fully-walkable 3D models. Dry Falls overlook, Steamboat Rock, Ginkgo Petrified Forest, Steptoe, Spokane Falls, and named erratics including the Bretz-identified boulders.
Every asset is exported in the open formats your chapters and state agencies already use. Drop them into the platforms your audiences already live in — we hand over working files, not a black box.
This is what iceagefloodstrail.org becomes alongside the Phase 1 field capture — the official public-facing trail experience that integrates IAFI’s scholarship and Terrain360’s immersive capture.
Hero map, latest captures, what is the Ice Age Floods Trail.
In Phase 1The full interactive Terrain360 map — cinematic intro, 3D flood timeline, split view, every captured site.
In Phase 1Deep page per geologic location. 360° capture, drone, photogrammetry, geologic context, Bretz commentary.
~10 hero sites in Phase 1, full 138 in Phase 2Narrative timeline from ice dam breach to today. Embedded 3D visualization. Scale comparisons.
In Phase 1Bretz, Pardee, O’Connor, Bjornstad archive. IAFI scholarship surfaced to the public. Scholar bios.
Scaffolded in Phase 1One page per IAFI chapter and per geologic region. Each chapter gets a public home.
Scaffolded in Phase 1Itineraries, drive routes, seasonal notes, accessibility, partner integrations with state tourism.
Scaffolded in Phase 1IAFI front and center. Membership funnel, donation, partner attribution, dream-team bios.
In Phase 1This is the template every Phase 1 capture site lives in. Built once, scales to 138.
The largest waterfall on Earth, now dry. Five hundred immersive scenes wrap the plunge basin where the floods carved a 3.5-mile-wide cataract four times the width of Niagara. The full Site profile integrates the 360° capture, geologic context, J Harlen Bretz commentary, IAFI source data, and visitor information.
View the sample profileThe Phase 1 capture campaign already in your hands funds the build. Phases 2 and 3 are the roadmap that makes the trail a national destination.
A 2,000-foot-tall ice dam held back a lake the size of Lake Erie. When it failed, ~500 cubic miles of water emptied in 48 hours, scouring a quarter of Washington State down to bedrock. It happened dozens of times.
Questions, content corrections, chapter integration, partnership ideas — contact Ryan Abrahamsen, Terrain360 founder.
ryan@terrain360.com · 804.677.1456
James O’Connor (USGS) · Bruce Bjornstad · Stacy Warren (EWU) · Dan Coe (WGS) · Lloyd Dekay (IAFI Lower Columbia) · Jeffrey Becklund (IAFI Wenatchee) · Glenn Cruickshank · Justin Radford (NPS).