
Oct. 2022 Update from the National Geologic Trail
I’d like to start by thanking the Ice Age Floods





I’d like to start by thanking the Ice Age Floods

I have always loved the ocean. I spent my growing-up years

It’s been several years since our IAFI.org website first appeared

A near failure of berries and upland food sources has

Since late last year the Ice Age Floods Institute has

Our long time IAFI Membership Manager, Sylvia Thompson and her

The Chinook Scenic Byway is recognized as a premier driving

We’re sad to report that James “Jim” William Pritchard of Ephrata,

“To see a world in a grain of sand”, the

Our brains are pretty good at physics. For instance, you

A newly discovered crater suggests a second impact that would

Some 240 million years ago, an enormous supercontinent known as

To date, Earth is the only planet we know of

A 37,000-year-old mammoth butchering site, uncovered in New Mexico, might

IAFI Events
Explore and Discover How Our Amazing Region was Formed!
Field Trips, Presentations and Other Events are designed to educate, entertain and leave you with a sense of “wow” along with providing fascinating information about the Ice Age Floods.







Ice Age Floods Institute Events Inspire, Encourage Exploration, Offer Friendship and Involvement
Field Trips and Hikes are led by amateur and professional Geologists with new and amazing information to share. They are fun, exciting and informative outdoor adventures for the entire Family to enjoy!
Visit our Activities Event Calendar below for IAFI Field Trips, Hikes and other activities in your area, and go have a great time!



We offer indoor Presentations, especially popular when heat or cold make outdoor Field Trips too uncertain or uncomfortable. Many Presentations are available via Zoom.
We also offer programs for schools, senior centers and similar organizations to educate and stimulate minds about the Ice Age Floods.



Other Events such as meetings, festivals, conventions and gatherings, with various public and private organizations, help us tell the story of the Ice Age Floods, Geology, Wildlife and History.
We often have our ‘Store in a Box‘ at these types of events where people can view and purchase IAFI merchandise.

Geologists have been investigating a potential cycle in geological events for a long time. A recent analysis on the ages of 89 well-understood geological events from the past 260 million years show a catastrophic 27.5 million year pulse in eight clusters of world-changing geologic events over geologically small timespans. This

An interesting, 4 minute captioned video from UC Santa Cruz (ingomar200) of a satellite-view computer simulation illustrating flood paths and transient lakes of an Ice Age Flood. The video shows a physics-based computer simulation of the Great Flood from Glacial Lake Missoula about 15,000 years ago. At the time, an ice dam

There is considerable controversy regarding when humans first migrated into the Americas and whether they might have been in the local area during any of the Ice Age Floods. This 2016 video, produced by reputable sources, doesn’t answer that question, but it is an interesting and instructive visualization of human

As a city kid in the ‘60s my family occasionally visited my grandparents in the farm country of Washington State’s Waterville plateau. My grandfather and two uncles were wheat farmers near the small town of Withrow, the future site of which had been partly hedged in by the Okanagan lobe

This 3:50 minute animation, presented by the Crown Point Country Historical Society, illustrates the growth of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, the damming and back-up of Glacial Lake Missoula, and the progress of an Ice Age Flood through WA and OR after an ice dam collapse.

Palagonite Maar Just west of Hood River is a distinctive, short (<500 m) section of stratified orangeish oxidized volcanic tephra and highly fractured lava bombs. This mixture of oxidized volcanic particles ranging down to sub-micrometer sizes mixed with the larger lava bombs is a palagonite tuff. This deposit is the result of a “phreatic” eruption when lava erupted explosively

In August, Scott David, a postdoctoral researcher and Karin Lehnigk, a 2nd year PhD candidate from the University of Massachusetts visited the scablands for a week to do field studies. Karin was in search of granite erratics. Samples of these were taken to be processed for Beryllium-10 exposure dating, a

In what may be the most dramatic mass extinction in Earth’s history, an asteroid impacted our planet 66 million years ago near what is now Chicxulub on the Yucatan Peninsula. The resulting hellscape extinguished 75 percent of then living species – including all non-avian dinosaurs. Over the last few years, scientists