Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
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Education · in development

A field trip that fits inside a classroom.

The Ice Age Floods are the rare earth-science story that has everything at once: planetary scale, deep time, vivid landforms, and a fifty-year scientific argument with a clear winner. The immersive captures turn all of it into something a student can walk through.

Why this place teaches

Four lessons the landscape teaches by itself.

SCALE
How big is big?

Ten times every river on Earth is an abstraction until you stand on the floor of the waterfall it made.

DEEP TIME
Reading a clock in rock

Cosmogenic dating put a real number on the floods. Students see how we know what we know.

EVIDENCE
A boulder is data

An erratic’s elevation is a measurement. The valley is a dataset you can read with your eyes.

HOW SCIENCE WORKS
Being right, early

Bretz was rejected for fifty years. The story of how he was vindicated is the scientific method itself.

Pathways
By age & depth
Elementary
K–5 · STORY & SCALE

The big story, told simply: a giant lake, an ice dam, a flood you could see from space. Virtual walks and a reconstruction to watch.

Middle school
6–8 · LANDFORMS & EVIDENCE

Match landforms to the forces that made them. Use erratics and ripple marks as evidence of flow direction and depth.

High school
9–12 · DATING & ARGUMENT

Cosmogenic exposure dating, the Bretz controversy, and how a scientific consensus actually changes. Reading primary field notes.

Higher ed & lifelong
RESEARCH ARCHIVE

The full field record, the published chronology, and the source materials behind every claim on the site.

In the classroom

The capture is the curriculum.

360°
Virtual field trips

Walk a real trail on the classroom screen , no bus, no permission slips, any weather.

3D
Specimens to handle

Spin a flood boulder, find the striations, measure it , the rock in your hands, on a tablet.

FILM
The reconstruction

A short rendered film of the dam failing and the flood running , the hook that starts the unit.

PRINT
Field guides

Printable worksheets and guides that work offline and travel to a visitor-center kiosk.

Sample lesson · grades 6–8

Read a boulder as a depth gauge.

One erratic, one number, one big idea: if an iceberg carried this rock to 327 feet, the floodwater had to be at least that deep. Do it across a dozen boulders and you’ve mapped a flood.

Open the specimen used in this lesson →
1
Open a 3D erratic and record its lithology and elevation from the specimen label.
2
Trace its origin on the map , how far did it travel, and which way?
3
Plot several boulders’ elevations. What was the minimum flood depth here?
4
Argue it: what assumptions does the depth estimate depend on?
Standards alignment

Mapped to NGSS earth-science and science-practice standards , landforms and surface processes, the history of planet Earth, and analyzing and arguing from evidence.

MS-ESS2 · Earth’s Systems HS-ESS1 · Earth’s Place & History SEP · Arguing from Evidence

Help us build it right.

The curriculum hub is a Phase 2 build , and it should be shaped by the teachers who’ll use it. Tell us your grade, your standards, and what would actually help.

Reach the team →