It’s well known that there was a series of floods in the Pacific northwest near the end of the last ice age. Here’s a map and short discussion about it.
Is this the only place such catastrophic flooding occured? There was a hell of a lot of water tied up in the ice sheets. You’d think this kind of flooding would be found in other parts of North America. Or was the geology/geography of the Clark Fork area unique in its formation of the ice dam?
Googling finds a few vague references to ice age flooding near Lake Huron, although I couldn’t find much details about that. Anywhere else?
Aslo there were some 20 ice ages over the past 2.5 million years. Did any of these earlier ice ages cause such flooding?
Floding was common and unremarkable during the Pleistocene ice age; near my own town of old York can be found the remains of Lake Pickering, which would have been the largest lake in Britain if it still existed.
However the Lake Missoula mentioned on the link seems to have been particularly spectacular, if not unexpected given the rapid changes in water level during the various ice ages and interstadials.
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Please see the recent book “Noah’s Flood”, which is an excellent book studying a very compelling theory of a massive deluge of the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea region being the basis for Noah’s flood. They also mention a possibility of huge flood through the Straits of Gibraltar, which essentially “filled the Mediterranean”. It’s a book of especially compelling evidence and very soundly based.
There were buildups of meltwater behind ice dams throughout a great deal of North America and Eurasia at the end of the last ice advance (and presumably previous ones as well). What makes the scablands unusual results from the longevity of the Clark Forks ice dam and the relative aridity of the climate ever since.
If, as seems likely, similar scouring occurred around the Great Lakes, Manitoba, and the Hudson Bay Lowlands, soil deposition by rivers and later, non-catastrophic flooding has erased any evidence of it.