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GLACIAL LAKE MISSOULA and Its Humongous Floods
Book $15.00. Mountain Press, 2001.

By David Alt. As geologist J Harlen Bretz walked the dry scabland channels of eastern Washington in the 1920s, it dawned on him that he was viewing a landscape sculpted by water. Lots of water. A flood of catastrophic proportions. Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods tells the gripping tale of a huge Ice Age lake that drained suddenly---not just once but repeatedly---and reshaped the landscape of the Northwest. The narrative follows the path of the floodwaters as they raged from western Montana across the Idaho Panhandle, then scoured through eastern Washington and down the Columbia Gorge to the Pacific Ocean. This is also the story of geologists grappling with scientific controversy---of how personalities, pride and prejudice sometimes supersede scientific evidence.

IAFI member reviews:

Author David Alt is a geology professor at the University of Montana. The first half of the book documents glacial Lake Missoula, and provides the most complete coverage of the lake that I've seen in the popular paperbacks about the floods. Alt then traces the routes of the floods across northern Idaho, the Columbia Plateau and down the Columbia River, including the Willamette Valley, to the Pacific Ocean in the second half of this book. The only negative that I find is that many of the maps lack detail. It is an understandable and fun read and certainly worth the $15 list price.
---Gary Kleinknecht

This book would be useful for anyone with an interest in the natural history of the ice-age Missoula floods. The book is well written for the layman, with which the author has proven skill and success via a number of contributions to the popular "Roadside Geology" series, produced by the same publisher. The book is organized in a chronological progression of 30 vignettes starting with the lake itself and ending at the Pacific Ocean. Disappointingly absent is any mention of flood features off the continental shelf, which have recently come to light (e.g., Zuffa et al., J. Geology, v. 108). It is here where most of the thousands of cubic kilometers of flood-scoured soil and rock finally came to rest. The author's intimate knowledge and over 30 years experience with glacial Lake Missoula, of which the first half of the book is devoted, is well expressed.

However, some of the names and accounts of flood features along the Channeled Scabland and the Pasco Basin are inaccurate and misleading in their interpretation. For the wealth of geologic literature published in these regions indicates that details on the mechanics and frequency of flooding are still open to debate. To the author's credit, he alerts us to the fact that too many flood features are succumbing to development, and those that remain should be protected and preserved.

The author also does an admirable job acknowledging the existence and importance of the many pre-Wisconsin flood episodes that preceded the more renowned last-glacial floods. And finally, Alt points out man's myopic view of climate change; despite our immediate anthropocentric fears of global warming, a return to glaciation and renewed flooding is inevitable.
---Bruce Bjornstad

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