I grew up in a region of southeastern Washington state known as the Palouse. This landscape, which I took for granted as a child, gradually became more impactful for me as an adult when I learned more about the forces that came into play, shaping the area in which I lived, roamed, and wandered.
Originally, the landscape of eastern Washington and Oregon, southwestern Idaho, and a divot of Nevada, was shaped in large part by enormous flows of lava spawned by a hot spot which now -- because of the drift of the continental north American tectonic plate -- sits under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. These lava flows were active between 17 million and 9 million years ago.
But what's extremely rare, and most interesting about the landscape of the Palouse is that most of it was shaped relatively recently -- within the last 20,000 years -- by massive floods occasioned by various Ice Age lakes which no longer exist.
This episode by Central Washington University geologist Nick Zentner gives a quick overview of this area of the earth, especially the Ice Age floods which not so long ago scoured the land. Nick has many such videos and most of them are at least an hour in length, so geologically speaking, this is a quick sprint through the way in which this magnificent land was shaped.
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