J. Harlen Bretz - Dry Falls State Park - Coulee City, WA - Citizen Memorials on Waymarking.com

Bretz, J. Harlen (1882-1981), Geologist

Harlen Bretz was a geologist who launched one of the great controversies of modern science by arguing, in the 1920s, that the deep canyons and pockmarked buttes of the arid "scablands" of Eastern Washington had been created by a sudden, catastrophic flood -- not, as most of his peers believed, by eons of gradual erosion. It was a bold challenge to the prevailing principle of "uniformitarianism," which held that the earth was shaped by processes that can be observed in the present. Since a flood of the almost Biblical proportions envisioned by Bretz had never been seen, the idea was dismissed as a throwback to the pre-scientific doctrine of "catastrophism." Not until the 1940s did other geologists begin to present new evidence supporting the flood theory. Satellite imagery in the 1970s provided the final vindication. Bretz had the satisfaction of living long enough to see his once heretical ideas become the new orthodoxy. In 1979, at age 96, he received the Penrose Medal, geology's highest honor. He later reportedly told his son: "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over" (Smithsonian)...

...Bretz began to explore the scablands -- so named because parts resemble partially healed wounds cut deep into the epidermis of earth -- in the summer of 1922. He returned every summer for the next seven years, usually accompanied by his wife, their two young children (Rudolph, born in Seattle in 1914, and Rhoda, born in Chicago in 1918), a collie dog, and several students. They traveled west in a Dodge sedan, with a tent on the front bumper, a grub box on the back, and bedrolls tied to the sides. It was gumshoe geology, much of it done on foot because the terrain was too rugged for motor vehicles, trying to unlock the mysteries of one of the most unusual places on earth.

"Outrageous Hypothesis"
Bretz had built a modest reputation as an expert on stream and glacial erosion by the time he turned his attention to the scablands. He quickly became convinced that neither kind of erosion could account for what he saw there: huge, dry channels; great chunks of prairie stripped down to bare basalt; massive boulders of granite scattered in places far from any natural source of granite; circular divots in the earth that were so big, cattle could be hidden in them; cataracts -- one five times as wide as Niagara -- that had once clearly been waterfalls, in an area that gets less rainfall in a year than Seattle does in a month. The depth of the channels, the fact that the channel bottoms were filled with coarse gravel carried in from outside the area, the scouring of the basalt bedrock: to Bretz, all this suggested a sudden, violent flood.

Bretz introduced his flood theory in a paper published in late 1923. He included a detailed geomorphic map of what he called "the Channeled Scabland," showing a network of branching and interconnecting channels that he concluded could only have been carved by a fast and furious inundation. "All other hypotheses meet fatal objections," he wrote. "These remarkable records of running water on the Columbia Plateau and in the valleys of the Snake and Columbia Rivers cannot be interpreted in terms of ordinary river action and ordinary valley development." He concluded with a simple statement: "It was a debacle which swept the Columbia Plateau" (Bretz, 1923, pp. 621, 649).

The reaction from the geologic community was, in a word, glacial. Since the 1790s, the science of geology had been framed by the principle of "uniformitarianism": the idea that geologic change in the past resulted from the same slow, steady processes at work today. Bretz's flood, with elements that suggested the Biblical story of Noah, seemed like a reversion to a pre-scientific era. It was, said one critic, an "outrageous hypothesis."
From History Link