Ice Age Floods Animation

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Transcript

At the end of the last Ice Age, 18,000-13,000 years ago a wall of ice blocked the Clark Fork River near the Idaho–Montana border.

Behind it, swelled Glacial Lake Missoula.

The catastrophic dam failure gave way to the world’s largest recorded freshwater floods.

Water backed up behind narrows like Wallula Gap.

Flood water reached 800 feet high through the Columbia River Gorge.

This extraordinary sequence of events repeated itself perhaps as many as a hundred times.

The Ice Age floods left behind a magnificent landscape found nowhere else on Earth.

Duration:

3 minutes, 26 seconds

Imagine the greatest floods on earth crashing across and sculpting the lands of the northwestern United States. This incredible true story is recorded in the rock and sediment of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. You can explore the geologic clues and special landscapes made by the Ice Age Floods at sites along the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail and glimpse a visualization of these events by watching this animated video.