41-2 Six Decades of (Sometimes Outrageous) Geological Hypothesizing about Catastrophic Flooding

Session: Philosophy of Extreme Events and Landscape Evolution on Earth and Other Planets: Thinking Geologically in the Spirit of Victor Baker

Presenting Author:

Author:

Abstract:

My greatest geology teacher has been Earth (nature) herself.  There also were human mentors, first coming at RPI: Brian Bayly, Gerry Friedman, Sam Katz, and visiting prof. Rowl Twidale.  Then came Univ. of Colorado graduate mentors Bill Bradley and Pete Birkeland.  With them came a succession of mentor-to-mentor influences that I have come to understand as part the history and philosophy of geology: Arthur Howard and J. Hoover Mackin; Douglas Johnson; William Morris Davis; Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Louis Agassiz; Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt; and Abraham Gottlob Werner.  Through this tree of mentorship I inherited my habits of geological thinking.

Though always a geologist in spirit, my professional geological hypothesizing began in the mid 1960s when I investigated limestone caverns carved by vadose-zone flood flows.  In graduate school I re-discovered a connection to eastern Washington, where catastrophic flooding had formed the Channeled Scabland.  That study is what W. M. Davis termed an “outrageous geological hypothesis” (OGH).  The scabland OGH then inspired my studies of extreme flash flooding in central Texas, leading to the science that I named “paleoflood hydrology.”

In the early 1970s Nature provided another source for OGHs.  Spacecraft imagery showed that what I was learning about “mega-flooding” for the ice-age Earth could applied to Mars.  I became a planetary geologist, discovering relationships that led to more OGHs: ancient Mars had an “Oceanus Borealis” that was linked through hydrological cycling to that planet’s Earth-like ancient past.  All this discovery upon discovery has now led to the philosophical: how all of us can do better at what it is to really be geologists.

On July 4^th of this year central Texas experienced a catastrophic event that government officials and political leaders termed “unprecedented” and “thousand-year” flooding.  While such terms provide their utterers with responsibility avoidance, they belie the truth that only Earth (Nature) can provide.  The flooding was indeed catastrophic, but it was man, not Nature, who made it so.  Nature long ago left us warnings, in sediments and in landforms, as to what could happen,  This “catastrophe” was caused by a failure to heed Earth’s warmings.  Because we geologists can see the absolute truth that Earth presents, we need to speak that truth to power – even when it requires some outrageous geological hypothesizing.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-8316

© Copyright 2025 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved.