Wenatchee Valley Erratics Chapter to meet Tuesday, October 8
Searching the Okanogan Drainage for Multiple Ice Age Events and Catastrophic Flooding: A FOOLS Journey
Wenatchee Valley Erratics Chapter of the Ice Age Floods Institute will meet at 7:00 P.M., Tuesday, October 8 at the Wenatchee Valley Museum.
Glacial features of the Okanogan area have stories to tell, and a FOOL has come to tell them. Don Hruska, retired mining geologist, is one of four Okanogan residents who formed the FOOLS, Friends of the Okanogan Lobe. Their quest has been to investigate how geologic forces shaped the Okanogan landscape.
The Okanogan drainage is in the heart of the last ice sheet of the 2.6 million-year-old Pleistocene Ice Age. That ice sheet left a covering rich in glacial drift and associated glacial topography in the Okanogan. A number of theories abound about the pre-ice terrain. When was the onset and gradual decay of the ice? Are there indications of older ice events? Is there evidence of flooding episodes, some perhaps catastrophic, that may have contributed to the large scabland floods that are familiar to us?
Plan on joining the field trip next spring, when they will visit many of these Ice Age features.
Don’s book, Okanogan Ice Skating: Three Million Years of Glacial Impact and Basement Rumbling, will soon be on sale in the IAFI bookstore (https://iafi.org/product-category/book/).
The program is free & open to the public.
For overviews of the Ice Age Floods and more information on the Ice Age Floods Institute, please see their website: http://www.iafi.org; http://www.hugefloods.com; and quadricopter videos of Ice Age features, http://www.brucebjornstad.com.
