Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail
Broadway High School opened as Seattle High School in 1902 in what is now Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood at East Broadway and East Pine Street. Although high school students had been served previously at Seattle's Territorial University and as part of the multi-level...
Broadway High School opened as Seattle High School in 1902 in what is now Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood at East Broadway and East Pine Street. Although high school students had been served previously at Seattle's Territorial University and as part of the multi-level Central Schools I and II, Seattle High School was the first dedicated high school built in Seattle. The school was renamed to Washington High School in 1906, and then Broadway High School in 1908.[2] It was torn down in the 1970's to make room for Seattle Community College. from Wikipedia. Bretz taught biology here in 1907.— Bretz Places
This is one of more than 1,800 field sites cataloged in the early scabland surveys — the bedrock of the Ice Age Floods scientific record. The Bretz-era researchers walked the ground first; modern cosmogenic dating, LiDAR, and remote sensing have since extended and refined what they mapped.
Active: 1914-1979 (primary IAF fieldwork 1922-1932; Penrose Medal 1979) Affiliation: University of Chicago (Instructor 1914, Professor 1926, retired 1947, emeritus through 1979) Key paper: Bretz, J H. (1923). "The Channeled Scabland of the Columbia Plateau." Journal of Geology 31(8): 617-649.
Bretz spent seven summer field seasons beginning in 1922 walking the basalt coulees, dry cataracts, and giant gravel bars of eastern Washington and concluded that the landscape required a catastrophic flood at a scale no existing process could produce. He coined the term "Channeled Scabland" in his 1923 paper and over the next decade defended the hypothesis against a uniformitarian geology establishment that had no plausible source for the water and viewed catastrophism as scientifically illegitimate. Bretz refused to name a source until Pardee's 1942 paper supplied one: Glacial Lake Missoula. He continued publishing on the scablands as an emeritus professor through the 1950s and 1960s, including his synthesis "Washington's Channeled Scabland" (1959). The Geological Society of America awarded him the Penrose Medal in 1979 at age 96; he reportedly remarked to his son, "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."
Source: J Harlen Bretz - Wikipedia; HistoryLink.org; University of Chicago Magazine
Every site along the trail will receive the full Terrain360 capture treatment: ground-level 360° panoramas, drone aerial imagery, and photogrammetry-based 3D models that visitors can spin in their browser. This page reserves the slots; the imagery flows in as field capture completes.
Ground-level 360° panorama, every step along the feature, captured by Terrain360 field crews.
Drone flyovers reveal the geometry of catastrophe — ripple marks, gravel bars, and scour patterns invisible from the ground.
Photogrammetry and Gaussian-splat models let visitors rotate, measure, and inspect features in detail-page WebGL viewers.
Modern research has confirmed Bretz's core hypothesis while revealing even greater complexity: multiple floods over 2,000 years, each releasing up to 530 cubic miles of water from Glacial Lake Missoula at estimated peak flows of 386 million cubic feet per second.