Dry Falls #club100
There is no end to the interesting things in Washington state.
These are the Dry Falls and they were once the largest waterfalls in the world. They were 3.5 miles wide and over 400 feet tall. It would have been impressive to see.
Of course, to see these falls, we would have had to be alive at the end of the Ice Age when the glaciers were melting. That water is gone now and all that is left is a saline pond and a cliff face.
The melting glacial waters were pretty powerful, and deep channels were carved through the rock and soil. That must have been a lot of fast flowing water to create these channels, which are referred to as "coulees".
I wonder what made the glaciers melt so fast? Maybe I should google that.
...
Ok I am back. There seems to be a couple different reasons suggested.
One is that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere accelerated after the glaciers stopped growing. Sea levels rose 10 meters within a few hundred years. That caused more fresh water to drain into the ocean and interrupted the currents, which caused warm water from the equator flow south toward antarctica, which shrank the ice there, which led to change in the circumpolar winds, which somehow caused the ocean to release a lot of CO2, which raised the global temperature. It was a big chain reaction.
OK then.
What is really interesting is that the temperature rise at the end of the last ice age is roughly equivalent to the temperature rise we have experience since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
BUT why did the glaciers stop growing in the first place?
They believe it might have to do with variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
or
Another theory suggests that the ice sheets in the north had become too huge and unstable, so they started to melt as they encroached warmer climes.
Either way, melting water had a strong ability to reshape the Earth.
So do humans. Humans can form their own coulees pretty much wherever they want. Someone decided they needed to blast their way through solid rock to accommodate the highway. It was almost as efficient as a glacier.
This is a 100 % #steemexclusive POWER UP! post for #club100
You managed to enter the Steemit. Sometimes I couldn't get in either.
Its weird.
Beautiful and exactly the type of landscape that made me interested in moving out west years back out of college. Still on the east coast, but someday I would at least love to get in a vacation out there.
Every part of the continent has something special. I lived on the east coast for about 10 years and I miss it.
Oh yeah? What do you miss about the east coast?
I lived in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I miss the century homes, the sea, the fish, the culture, the people. I would go back, but now I am in Saskatchewan. Who knows what the future holds.
It is of course looks spectacular but knowing that the area was filled with water and glacier that might be even more impressive. It is a shame that such beauty like glaciers are melting all over the world due to global warming makes our environment so fragile. We hope it is reversible but what if not?
Love your post and the photos.
If not, and it probably IS NOT, then things will change. The Earth itself is stronger than us. All we are doing is destroying our ability to survive on the Earth. A million years from now, we might just be like a scar from a bad infection.
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