“Global Megaflood Science” – Dr. Victor R. Baker – Lower Columbia Chapter -Virtual Meeting
Starting in the late 1960s, an accelerating pace of discovery has revealed that the last major de-glaciation of planet Earth involved a global pattern of huge outbursts of water from the margins of wasting continental ice sheets. Much of this water was delivered as relatively short-duration floods with peak flows comparable to those of ocean currents.
The global inventory of these phenomena now includes about 4 dozen examples from Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Iceland. Though there have been many advances in understanding the physical processes and geochronology of megaflooding, important controversies remain, including: the role of flooding on areas that are now under the oceans; the nature of subglacial megaflooding; and the details of the vast network of megaflood landscape features in Asia. Immense outburst floods likely induced very rapid, short-term effects on the global Earth environment.
Recorded Thursday, July 16, 2020 at 7:00 PM