The Spokane Flood debates: historical background and philosophical perspective

Abstract

Abstract The 1920s–1930s debates over the origin of the ‘Channeled Scabland’ landscape of eastern Washington, northwestern USA, focused on the cataclysmic flooding hypothesis of J Harlen Bretz. During the summer of 1922, Bretz began leading field parties of advanced University of Chicago students into the region. In his first paper, published in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America , Bretz took special care not to mention cataclysmic origins. However, in a subsequent paper in the Journal of Geology , to the editorial board of which he had recently been added, Bretz formally described his hypothesis that an immense late Pleistocene flood, which he named the ‘Spokane Flood’, had derived from the margins of the nearby Cordilleran Ice Sheet. This cataclysm neatly accounted for numerous interrelated aspects of the Channeled Scabland landscape and nearby regions. Nevertheless, the geological community largely resisted Bretz's hypothesis for decades, despite his enthusiastic and eloquent defence thereof. Resolution of the controversy came gradually, initially through the recognition by J. T. Pardee of a plausible source for the flooding: ice-dammed Pleistocene glacial Lake Missoula in northern Idaho and western Montana. Eventually, by the 1960s, the field evidence for cataclysmic flooding became overwhelming, and physical processes were found to be completely consistent with that evidence. The controversy is of philosophical interest in regard to its documentation of the attitudes of geologists toward hypotheses, which illustrate aspects of geological reasoning that are distinctive in degree from those of other sciences.