Peak discharge of a Pleistocene lava-dam outburst flood in Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA

Abstract

The failure of a lava dam 165,000 yr ago produced the largest known flood on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. The Hyaloclastite Dam was up to 366 m high, and geochemical evidence linked this structure to outburst-flood deposits that occurred for 32 km downstream. Using the Hyaloclastite outburst-flood deposits as paleostage indicators, we used dam-failure and unsteady flow modeling to estimate a peak discharge and flow hydrograph. Failure of the Hyaloclastite Dam released a maximum 11 × 10 9 m 3 of water in 31 h. Peak discharges, estimated from uncertainty in channel geometry, dam height, and hydraulic characteristics, ranged from 2.3 to 5.3 × 10 5 m 3 s −1 for the Hyaloclastite outburst flood. This discharge is an order of magnitude greater than the largest known discharge on the Colorado River (1.4 × 10 4 m 3 s −1) and the largest peak discharge resulting from failure of a constructed dam in the USA (6.5 × 10 4 m 3 s −1). Moreover, the Hyaloclastite outburst flood is the oldest documented Quaternary flood and one of the largest to have occurred in the continental USA. The peak discharge for this flood ranks in the top 30 floods (>10 5 m 3 s −1) known worldwide and in the top ten largest floods in North America.