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The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods. They are located in the southeastern part of Washington state. The Channeled Scablands were scoured by more than 40 cataclysmic floods during the Last Glacial Maximum and innumerable older cataclysmic floods over the last two million years. The floods eroded the area into the Palouse loess.
Geologist J Harlen Bretz defined "scablands" in a series of papers written in the 1920s as lowlands diversified by a multiplicity of irregular channels and rock basins eroded into basalt. Flood waters eroded the loess cover, creating large anastomizing channels that exposed bare basalt and creating butte-and-basin topography. The buttes range in height from , while the rock basins range from in width up to the long and 30 m deep Rock Lake. Bretz further stated, "The channels run uphill and downhill, they unite and they divide, they head on the back-slopes and cut through the summit; they could not be more erratically and impossibly designed."
The debate on the origin of the Scablands that ensued for four decades became one of the great controversies in the history of earth science. The Scablands are also important to planetary scientists as perhaps the best terrestrial analog of the Martian outflow channels.
History
thumb|left|250px|Map of the Channeled Scablands
Bretz conducted research and published many papers during the 1920s describing the Channeled Scablands. His theories of how they were formed required short but immense floodsfor which Bretz had no explanation. His theories of apparent catastrophism met with vehement opposition from geologists of the day, who tried to explain the features with uniformitarian theoriesthat they were shaped by processes still acting today.
J. T. Pardee first suggested in 1925 to Bretz that the draining of a glacial lake could account for flows of the magnitude needed. Pardee continued his research over the next 30 years, collecting and analyzing evidence that eventually identified Lake Missoula as the source of the floods (now the Missoula floods) and creator of the Channeled Scablands.
Pardee's and Bretz's theories were accepted only after decades of painstaking work and fierce scientific debate. Research on open-channel hydraulics in the 1970s put Bretz's theories on solid scientific ground. In 1979 Bretz received the highest medal of the Geological Society of America, the Penrose Medal, to recognize that he had developed one of the great ideas in the earth sciences.
Geology
Distinct geomorphological features include coulees, dry falls, streamlined hills and islands of remnant loess, gravel fans and bars, and giant current ripples. River valleys formed by erosional downcutting of rivers create V-shaped valleys, while glaciers carve out U-shaped valleys. The Channeled Scablands have a rectangular cross section, with flat plateaus and steep canyon sides, and are spread over immense areas of eastern Washington. The morphology of the scablands is butte-and-basin.
They exhibit a unique drainage pattern that appears to have an entrance in the northeast and an exit in the southwest. The Cordilleran ice sheet dammed up Glacial Lake Missoula at the Purcell Trench Lobe. As many as 100 separate, cataclysmic Ice Age floods may have occurred during the last glaciation. There have been at least 17 complete interglacial-glacial cycles since about 1.77 million years ago, and perhaps as many as 44 interglacial-glacial cycles since the beginning of the Pleistocene about 2.58 million years ago. Presuming a dozen (or more) floods were associated with each glaciation, the total number of cataclysmic Ice Age Missoula floods that flowed through the Channeled Scablands for the entire Pleistocene Epoch could possibly number in the hundreds, perhaps exceeding a thousand Ancient Cataclysmic Floods.
There are also immense potholes and ripple marks, much larger than those found on ordinary rivers. When these features were first studied, no known theories could explain their origin. The giant current ripples are between high and are regularly spaced, relatively uniform hills.