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It`s Okay To Be Smart, The Unbelievable Story of Earth’s Most Epic Flood (1)

The Unbelievable Story of Earth's Most Epic Flood (1)

Thank you to Climeworks for supporting PBS.

Hey, smart people, Joe here.

I'm in the scablands of eastern Washington right now,

and well, that's a waterfall behind me.

It's a pretty nice waterfall,

but as waterfalls go, it's actually pretty average.

Its height, the volume of water that falls over its face,

they don't rank anywhere near the top 10 as waterfalls go.

But this waterfall does hold

one important record among all waterfalls.

It was created in what is perhaps the largest flood

to ever happen on planet Earth, at least that we know of.

Whatever you're imagining as this flood,

you need to think bigger.

Much, much bigger. (upbeat music rising)

Because the flood that created this

and the entire landscape around us is bigger than anything

that could happen on the planet today, by a long shot.

(whimsical music)

Across what is today a dry and arid landscape,

there are clues of an epic flood hidden in rocky scars

and strange land forms if you know how to read them.

The pieces of this mystery are hard

to make sense of on their own,

but together they tell a story that's,

well, almost impossible to believe.

In fact, it took decades for scientists to finally accept

that these cataclysmic events really did happen.

And in the process, this story completely changed science,

forcing geologists to totally rethink their ideas

about the powerful forces and events

that have shaped the Earth throughout deep time.

This discovery also set the stage for other discoveries,

about other violent events

that have shaped not only our planet, but others.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Our story begins hundreds of miles

to the east in a beautiful river valley

where today we find the town of Missoula, Montana.

- Here we are, here it is!

- Okay. What's it?

- This is the Glacial Lake Missoula high water mark.

So, this marks the highest level

that Glacial Lake Missoula got in Missoula Valley.

So, this would've been the shore

of a giant glacial-fed lake.

- You guys know Kallie from "PBS Eons", right?

She hiked us up here to see this,

which is why I'm so not sweaty at all.

- Yeah, you gotta hike to see these high water marks.

- If Kallie and I had stood in this spot 15,000 years ago,

we'd have found ourselves in the shore of an immense lake.

At the end of the last Ice Age, the valley below us

sat beneath 300 meters of peaceful blue water.

- As far as you can see would've been basically underwater,

except for where we're standing

and the tops of some of these taller mountains,

all of it would've been underwater.

- These would've just been little pointy islands,

in the lake. - Just little islands, yeah.

- It was called Lake Missoula, a freshwater inland sea,

more than 600 meters deep at its deepest point,

holding more water than Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined.

But, why was there a lake here?

About the past million years, massive ice sheets advanced

and retreated across the Northern Hemisphere

during natural cycles of climate change.

During the last Ice Age, an ice sheet stretched unbroken

from Alaska to today's US-Canada border.

And one little finger of that ice sheet sat here

at the end of this river valley.

And that massive mountain of ice would've been right here.

You need to picture something more like the wall

from Game of Thrones than a big iceberg.

We're talking 2,000 feet tall of ice,

30 miles wide at its widest, and the south end of it ran up

against these mountains right here,

blocking the river and forming Glacial Lake Missoula.

It was big,

really big,

Just like a stopper filling a bathtub,

river water, rain, and melted snow backed up

behind this ice dam for centuries

forming a lake covering nearly 8,000 square kilometers.

But there's just one problem, ice floats in water.

First, a few leaks began to form in the ice dam,

and with the weight of thousands of cubic kilometers

of water pushing against it, one day...

- Just boom! It catastrophically failed.

The explosion, the sound of it,

probably would've carried throughout the entire northwest.

It drained probably in a couple of days.

- It's just impossible to imagine

a 2,000 foot wall of ice like Game of Thrones style,

just like. - Like failing.

- Just it cracks. - Just gone. Yeah, yeah.

It would've been pretty spectacular to say the least.

- A glacial lake twice the size of Rhode Island

emptied in just a couple days,

and the torrent of water escaping the broken ice dam

was equivalent to more than 10 times the flow

from all the rivers on the planet.

That is insane!

This kind of sudden glacial outburst is called a jökulhlaup.

Icelandic words are awesome and kind of scary.

It's almost impossible to put into scale

the unimaginable power of these flood waters,

but right behind me, we can see proof of them.

If you've ever seen those little ripples

that form in the sand at the bottom of a little stream,

well, there's ripples at the bottom of this valley

caused by the flood waters.

It's exactly the same phenomenon

as in that little tiny stream

enlarged to the size of an entire prairie.

It's mind-boggling.

As thousands of cubic kilometers of water

emptied out of this giant bathtub

flowing more than 120 kilometers per hour,

it set off the worst and most destructive flood

that we know of in Earth's history.

We think of erosion as something happening slowly over eons,

but these ice age floods

cataclysmically reshaped the landscape

in just a matter of days.

Water swept the land clean of top soil,

every bit of gravel, every bit of sand, gone.

It even ripped away bedrock in some places.

From above, we can see the scars left by this violent flood,

branching channels and coulees carved deep into the Earth.

They give this region its nickname,

the Channeled Scablands.

And there's nowhere that demonstrates the unimaginable scale

and power of these flood waters better than here, Dry Falls.

About 50 kilometers south of the Grand Coulee Dam,

we find what looks today like a deep, broad canyon,

slowly carved into the Earth over eons, perhaps.

But that's not what happened here.

Everything you see was carved almost instantly

by the violent flood waters from Lake Missoula.

During the floods,

this was the largest waterfall in the world,

five times the width of Niagara Falls.

The water was more than 30 meters deep

as it rushed over the edge,

ripping away rock from its 120 meter face

and carrying it downstream.

Elsewhere, powerful flood surges cut deep vertical canyons

and cataract cliffs in just days.

The raging waters were powerful enough

to redirect entire rivers like at Palouse Falls.

The ancient path of this river

flowed west through the Washtucna Coulee.

But during the floods, the river overflowed its banks,

raged south, and cut this new waterfall.

All across the scablands, raging whirlpools of flood water

carved potholes and craters into the bedrock.

The floods were so powerful

they carried giant granite boulders embedded in icebergs

dropping them hundreds of kilometers

from the mountains where they originated.

This here puppy's a fine piece

of Canadian granite.

Got no place here though.

These so-called erratics are scattered

throughout eastern Washington today.

Some even settling as far as western Oregon.

But there's another mystery to solve.

Okay, when we think about eroding rocks,

that seems like something that should take thousands,

millions of years even.

How did a flood that only lasted a couple

of days do so much damage to this landscape?

Well, that's cuz it's made of a very special kind

of rock that came from another kind of flood

millions of years before the Ice Age floods.

It was a flood of lava.

All across this area massive eruptions happened

that laid down lava 2,000 feet thick in some places

and that cooled into this. Basalt.

These are giant basalt columns behind me.

As that lava cooled over decades, even centuries,

it contracted.

And as it contracted, it broke,

it fractured along these amazing geometric faces.

This one's super cool.

You can see it's like a perfect hexagon.

They're almost like beehives

for giant lava eating rock bees or something.

So when that flood came through here,

these columns were already prebroken,

ready to be swept away.

An 80 mile an hour tidal wave tsunamis of flood water.

It's also a place that rattlesnakes like to hang out.

So, I think I've been here long enough.

So thousands of years ago,

a wall of ice was violently destroyed,

emptying 20 million cubic kilometers

of water per hour into eastern Washington,

scouring and reshaping the surface of the earth,

causing eons of erosion in mere days.

And eventually emptying out into the Pacific Ocean

where huge amounts of sediment and rock from Montana, Idaho

and Washington can still be found today.

And what's crazy is this didn't just happen once.

It's now thought that this ice dam repeatedly melted

and refroze as many as 25 times over several centuries.

Each time devastating the land with epic floods.

We can see evidence that Lake Missoula repeatedly filled

and emptied in the so-called strand-lines marking the hills

around the town,

each an ancient shoreline of this ice age lake.

And elsewhere, striped deposits called rhythmites,

show layers of sand and sediment laid down

and flood after flood.

These violent events all happened surprisingly recently

in human history.

Archeological evidence tells us

that humans had already crossed

into North America by the time of the floods.

The creation stories told by the Nez Perce

and Palouse Indian tribes

even contain similar flood elements.

- We don't have a lot of human artifacts

or fossils associated with the lake, it emptying,

but we know we had animals and humans

in the area during this time.

- And then you didn't.

- And-- (laughs)

Well, I'm just saying that human eyes probably saw the lake

and experienced the effects of the flood

and the catastrophic failure of it.

And it took a lot of work,

some really smart people to go against the grain

and be like, "No, no, no, this is a catastrophic flood."

And everybody's like, "No, no, no, no, no.

"No. That's not how it happened."

- When geologists J. Harlen Bretz first proposed the idea

of the Missoula floods in the 1920s,

people thought he was nuts.

At the time, geologists just didn't think

that large catastrophic events like this really happened.

Instead, everyone figured that earth's geologic formations

were carved only by the same slow, gradual processes

still happening today like rivers, glaciers and weather.

The old slow and steady idea called uniformitarianism

now stood alongside a new idea called catastrophism,

where rapid and violent events could sometimes shape

Earth's geology in ways

that slower processes couldn't explain.

And suddenly geologists began to see catastrophism

as an answer to other unanswered questions.

Like the formation of our moon by a planetary collision

and the asteroid impact that caused the dinosaur extinction

and more.

The Ice Age floods of Lake Missoula changed the face

of our planet in violent and dramatic ways,

but they also changed science.

Our planet's shapes and scars tell stories written

in time and stone if you know how to read them.

So listen to the earth,

keep your eyes open,

and stay curious.

Thank you Kallie for hiking us up here.

And if you want to be taken

on more great prehistoric adventures where you don't have

to sweat as much as I did,

go check out "PBS Eons".

- For sure.

- And thank you to Climeworks for supporting PBS.

Did you know that for over a hundred years

humans have been extracting carbon from the earth,

releasing excess carbon dioxide

into the air and instigating climate change?

Climeworks enables us to fight climate change

by permanently removing CO2 from the air.

They use a technology called direct air capture

The Unbelievable Story of Earth’s Most Epic Flood (1) The Unbelievable Story of Earth's Most Epic Flood (1) L'incredibile storia dell'alluvione più epica della Terra (1) 地球で最も壮大な大洪水の信じがたい物語 (1) Het ongelooflijke verhaal van de grootste overstroming op aarde (1) A inacreditável história do dilúvio mais épico da Terra (1)

Thank you to Climeworks for supporting PBS. |||Клаймворкс||| |||Клаймворкс|||

Hey, smart people, Joe here.

I'm in the scablands of eastern Washington right now, |||Я сейчас в каменистых пустошах восточного Вашингтона.||||| |||скребля||||| Ik ben nu in de schurft van Oost-Washington,

and well, that's a waterfall behind me.

It's a pretty nice waterfall,

but as waterfalls go, it's actually pretty average. |||||||средний ||водоспади||||| maar zoals watervallen gaan, is het eigenlijk vrij gemiddeld.

Its height, the volume of water that falls over its face,

they don't rank anywhere near the top 10 as waterfalls go.

But this waterfall does hold

one important record among all waterfalls.

It was created in what is perhaps the largest flood

to ever happen on planet Earth, at least that we know of.

Whatever you're imagining as this flood,

you need to think bigger.

Much, much bigger. (upbeat music rising)

Because the flood that created this

and the entire landscape around us is bigger than anything

that could happen on the planet today, by a long shot. dat zou bij lange na niet op de planeet kunnen gebeuren.

(whimsical music) (grillige muziek)

Across what is today a dry and arid landscape,

there are clues of an epic flood hidden in rocky scars ||||||||||шрами

and strange land forms if you know how to read them.

The pieces of this mystery are hard

to make sense of on their own,

but together they tell a story that's,

well, almost impossible to believe.

In fact, it took decades for scientists to finally accept

that these cataclysmic events really did happen. ||катастрофічні||||

And in the process, this story completely changed science,

forcing geologists to totally rethink their ideas

about the powerful forces and events

that have shaped the Earth throughout deep time.

This discovery also set the stage for other discoveries,

about other violent events

that have shaped not only our planet, but others.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Our story begins hundreds of miles

to the east in a beautiful river valley

where today we find the town of Missoula, Montana. |||||||Миссула| |||||||Міссула Монтана|

- Here we are, here it is!

- Okay. What's it?

- This is the Glacial Lake Missoula high water mark. |||Льодовиковий||||| - Dit is de hoogwaterlijn van het Glacial Lake Missoula.

So, this marks the highest level Dit is dus het hoogste niveau

that Glacial Lake Missoula got in Missoula Valley.

So, this would've been the shore

of a giant glacial-fed lake. van een gigantisch gletsjermeer.

- You guys know Kallie from "PBS Eons", right? |||Калли|||| |||Келлі||||

She hiked us up here to see this, |підняла нас|||||| Ze heeft ons hierheen gebracht om dit te zien,

which is why I'm so not sweaty at all.

- Yeah, you gotta hike to see these high water marks.

- If Kallie and I had stood in this spot 15,000 years ago,

we'd have found ourselves in the shore of an immense lake.

At the end of the last Ice Age, the valley below us

sat beneath 300 meters of peaceful blue water.

- As far as you can see would've been basically underwater,

except for where we're standing

and the tops of some of these taller mountains,

all of it would've been underwater.

- These would've just been little pointy islands,

in the lake. - Just little islands, yeah.

- It was called Lake Missoula, a freshwater inland sea, - Het heette Lake Missoula, een zoetwaterbinnenzee,

more than 600 meters deep at its deepest point,

holding more water than Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined. |||||Онтаріо|||Ері|

But, why was there a lake here?

About the past million years, massive ice sheets advanced

and retreated across the Northern Hemisphere |відступили||||

during natural cycles of climate change.

During the last Ice Age, an ice sheet stretched unbroken

from Alaska to today's US-Canada border. |Аляска|||||

And one little finger of that ice sheet sat here

at the end of this river valley.

And that massive mountain of ice would've been right here.

You need to picture something more like the wall

from Game of Thrones than a big iceberg. |||||||айсберг

We're talking 2,000 feet tall of ice,

30 miles wide at its widest, and the south end of it ran up

against these mountains right here,

blocking the river and forming Glacial Lake Missoula.

It was big,

really big,

Just like a stopper filling a bathtub, |||засіб|||ванна

river water, rain, and melted snow backed up

behind this ice dam for centuries

forming a lake covering nearly 8,000 square kilometers.

But there's just one problem, ice floats in water.

First, a few leaks began to form in the ice dam,

and with the weight of thousands of cubic kilometers

of water pushing against it, one day...

- Just boom! It catastrophically failed. |||катастрофічно|

The explosion, the sound of it,

probably would've carried throughout the entire northwest. ||||||північний захід

It drained probably in a couple of days. |виснажив||||||

- It's just impossible to imagine

a 2,000 foot wall of ice like Game of Thrones style,

just like. - Like failing.

- Just it cracks. - Just gone. Yeah, yeah.

It would've been pretty spectacular to say the least.

- A glacial lake twice the size of Rhode Island |||||||Род-Айленд|

emptied in just a couple days, випорожнений|||||

and the torrent of water escaping the broken ice dam ||потік|||||||

was equivalent to more than 10 times the flow

from all the rivers on the planet.

That is insane!

This kind of sudden glacial outburst is called a jökulhlaup. |||||||||ледниковый прорыв |||||виверження льодовика||||йокульглап

Icelandic words are awesome and kind of scary.

It's almost impossible to put into scale

the unimaginable power of these flood waters,

but right behind me, we can see proof of them.

If you've ever seen those little ripples

that form in the sand at the bottom of a little stream,

well, there's ripples at the bottom of this valley

caused by the flood waters.

It's exactly the same phenomenon

as in that little tiny stream

enlarged to the size of an entire prairie.

It's mind-boggling.

As thousands of cubic kilometers of water

emptied out of this giant bathtub

flowing more than 120 kilometers per hour,

it set off the worst and most destructive flood

that we know of in Earth's history.

We think of erosion as something happening slowly over eons,

but these ice age floods

cataclysmically reshaped the landscape катастрофически изменил ландшафт||| катастрофічно|||

in just a matter of days.

Water swept the land clean of top soil,

every bit of gravel, every bit of sand, gone.

It even ripped away bedrock in some places. ||||основа породи|||

From above, we can see the scars left by this violent flood,

branching channels and coulees carved deep into the Earth. |||русло оврага||||| |||глибокі улоговини|||||

They give this region its nickname,

the Channeled Scablands. ||Промытые земли

And there's nowhere that demonstrates the unimaginable scale

and power of these flood waters better than here, Dry Falls.

About 50 kilometers south of the Grand Coulee Dam, ||||||около 50 километров| ||||||Кулей|

we find what looks today like a deep, broad canyon, vinden we wat er vandaag uitziet als een diepe, brede kloof,

slowly carved into the Earth over eons, perhaps.

But that's not what happened here.

Everything you see was carved almost instantly

by the violent flood waters from Lake Missoula.

During the floods,

this was the largest waterfall in the world,

five times the width of Niagara Falls. |||||Ніагарського водоспаду|

The water was more than 30 meters deep

as it rushed over the edge, ||поспішно мчав|||

ripping away rock from its 120 meter face

and carrying it downstream. |||вниз по течії

Elsewhere, powerful flood surges cut deep vertical canyons |||потоки води||||каньйони Elders snijden krachtige vloedgolven diepe verticale kloven

and cataract cliffs in just days. |катаракти|||| en cataract kliffen in slechts enkele dagen.

The raging waters were powerful enough |бурхливі|||| De woeste wateren waren krachtig genoeg

to redirect entire rivers like at Palouse Falls. ||||||Палуза| ||||||Палузі|

The ancient path of this river

flowed west through the Washtucna Coulee. ||||Ваштукна| текла||||Ваштучна|

But during the floods, the river overflowed its banks, ||||||вийшла з берегів||

raged south, and cut this new waterfall. рвався||||||

All across the scablands, raging whirlpools of flood water |||каменистые пустоши||||| |||||вируни||| Overal in de schansen, razende draaikolken van vloedwater

carved potholes and craters into the bedrock. |выбоины и кратеры||||| |ямки|||||

The floods were so powerful

they carried giant granite boulders embedded in icebergs |||граніт||||айсберги

dropping them hundreds of kilometers

from the mountains where they originated.

This here puppy's a fine piece ||щеня||| Deze puppy hier is een mooi stuk

of Canadian granite. |канадський|

Got no place here though.

These so-called erratics are scattered |||блуждающие валуны|| |||блукаючі камені||

throughout eastern Washington today.

Some even settling as far as western Oregon. ||оселяючись|||||

But there's another mystery to solve.

Okay, when we think about eroding rocks,

that seems like something that should take thousands,

millions of years even.

How did a flood that only lasted a couple

of days do so much damage to this landscape?

Well, that's cuz it's made of a very special kind ||бо|||||||

of rock that came from another kind of flood

millions of years before the Ice Age floods.

It was a flood of lava.

All across this area massive eruptions happened

that laid down lava 2,000 feet thick in some places die op sommige plaatsen lava van 2000 voet dik neerlegde?

and that cooled into this. Basalt. |||||базальт

These are giant basalt columns behind me. |||базальтові стовпи|||

As that lava cooled over decades, even centuries,

it contracted. |зменшився het contracteerde.

And as it contracted, it broke,

it fractured along these amazing geometric faces. |зламаний|||||

This one's super cool.

You can see it's like a perfect hexagon. |||||||шестикутник

They're almost like beehives

for giant lava eating rock bees or something.

So when that flood came through here,

these columns were already prebroken, ||||предварительно сломаны ||||попередньо зламані

ready to be swept away.

An 80 mile an hour tidal wave tsunamis of flood water. ||||||цунамі|||

It's also a place that rattlesnakes like to hang out. |||||гремучие змеи|||| |||||гремучі змії||||

So, I think I've been here long enough.

So thousands of years ago,

a wall of ice was violently destroyed,

emptying 20 million cubic kilometers випорожнення|||

of water per hour into eastern Washington,

scouring and reshaping the surface of the earth, очищення|||||||

causing eons of erosion in mere days.

And eventually emptying out into the Pacific Ocean

where huge amounts of sediment and rock from Montana, Idaho

and Washington can still be found today.

And what's crazy is this didn't just happen once.

It's now thought that this ice dam repeatedly melted

and refroze as many as 25 times over several centuries. |замерзало снова||||||| |і знову заморожував|||||||

Each time devastating the land with epic floods.

We can see evidence that Lake Missoula repeatedly filled

and emptied in the so-called strand-lines marking the hills ||||||берегові лінії||||

around the town,

each an ancient shoreline of this ice age lake.

And elsewhere, striped deposits called rhythmites, |||||ритмиты ||смужкові|||ритміти

show layers of sand and sediment laid down

and flood after flood.

These violent events all happened surprisingly recently

in human history.

Archeological evidence tells us

that humans had already crossed

into North America by the time of the floods.

The creation stories told by the Nez Perce ||||||Нез|Перс De scheppingsverhalen verteld door de Nez Perce

and Palouse Indian tribes

even contain similar flood elements.

- We don't have a lot of human artifacts

or fossils associated with the lake, it emptying,

but we know we had animals and humans

in the area during this time.

- And then you didn't.

- And-- (laughs)

Well, I'm just saying that human eyes probably saw the lake

and experienced the effects of the flood

and the catastrophic failure of it.

And it took a lot of work,

some really smart people to go against the grain

and be like, "No, no, no, this is a catastrophic flood."

And everybody's like, "No, no, no, no, no.

"No. That's not how it happened."

- When geologists J. Harlen Bretz first proposed the idea ||||Брец|||| |||Гарлен|Бретц||висунули||

of the Missoula floods in the 1920s,

people thought he was nuts.

At the time, geologists just didn't think

that large catastrophic events like this really happened.

Instead, everyone figured that earth's geologic formations ||||||геологічні утворення

were carved only by the same slow, gradual processes

still happening today like rivers, glaciers and weather.

The old slow and steady idea called uniformitarianism |||||||униформитаризм |||||||однорідність процесів

now stood alongside a new idea called catastrophism, |||||||катастрофизм |||||||катастрофізм stond nu naast een nieuw idee genaamd catastrofisme,

where rapid and violent events could sometimes shape

Earth's geology in ways

that slower processes couldn't explain.

And suddenly geologists began to see catastrophism

as an answer to other unanswered questions.

Like the formation of our moon by a planetary collision

and the asteroid impact that caused the dinosaur extinction

and more.

The Ice Age floods of Lake Missoula changed the face

of our planet in violent and dramatic ways,

but they also changed science.

Our planet's shapes and scars tell stories written

in time and stone if you know how to read them.

So listen to the earth,

keep your eyes open,

and stay curious.

Thank you Kallie for hiking us up here.

And if you want to be taken

on more great prehistoric adventures where you don't have

to sweat as much as I did,

go check out "PBS Eons".

- For sure.

- And thank you to Climeworks for supporting PBS.

Did you know that for over a hundred years

humans have been extracting carbon from the earth, mensen hebben koolstof uit de aarde gehaald,

releasing excess carbon dioxide

into the air and instigating climate change? ||||спричинення зміни клімату||

Climeworks enables us to fight climate change

by permanently removing CO2 from the air.

They use a technology called direct air capture