Randall Carlson
speaker
1,469 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 11 Mar
Randall Carlson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The problem is, is the scale. See, like this right here, the scale of water flow is immense. And the critics, see, his theory has never been accepted. The critics have said, well, the drumlin swarms that you're looking at would require floods on such a scale that we can't explain the origin of those floods. That's basically what has come down.
So it's very parallel to when J. Harlan Bretts was proposing in the 1920s that some of these channeled scablands features in Washington had been produced by these gigantic floods. The gist of the opposition said, well, if you can't provide a source for this flood water, then it wasn't catastrophic floods. It was something much more protracted, incremental, over a long period of time.
And your discharges that you're talking about, like several hundred million cubic feet per second, that's impossible. And if you can't explain how you could get peak discharges of that scale, get out of here. Same with John Shaw's work coming into the 80s and 90s, right? And just like Brett's, he could speculate, but he couldn't provide any evidence.
Like, how do you get such massive, like we're talking thousands of cubic miles of water discharging under the... How do you do that? Well, he couldn't come up with an explanation. He said, well, was there a reservoir on top? which would be supraglacial. Was it a reservoir of water at the bottom, subglacial? Was it a reservoir within the glacier mass called endglacial?
But in each case, the critics looked at it and said, well, we can see that, for example, glaciers today, you have spring, you have melting, you have surface melt ponds forming on top of the glaciers. Usually by well before midsummer, They disappear. Why do they disappear?
Because as the water accumulates on the glacier, and it's a temperate glacier because it's melting, temperate glaciers have a lot of fractures and cracks, what are called moulins, which are large apertures, sometimes can reach to the bottom of the glacier.
So what happens, this meltwater gets to a point where it reaches a certain volume, which is minuscule compared to what we're talking about here. It disappears. And then a week later, two weeks later, it's discharging from the snout. And they know that because they'll put dye tests, they call it dye testing. They put the dye, colored dye, in the water.
It disappears, and then they go to the snout of the glacier, and anywhere from a few days to three weeks later, here comes the colored water discharging, right? So they said, okay, from our modern observation of glaciers, you're not going to have thousands of cubic miles of water forming on top. Likewise on the bottom. Likewise within. So they've rejected Shaw's theory.
They said, no, we're going to go back to somehow it's the glaciers themselves because the volume of meltwater you're talking about is so extreme, there's no way we can explain it. Well, maybe there is a way you can explain it. And that would be, I think, Two candidates, one which I think is the better of the two, which is hypervelocity impacts. Hypervelocity.
And now we know about the number of hypervelocity impacts that we're now discovering in the history of this planet is extraordinary. And there's no reason why you couldn't have a multi-impact event over the ice sheet.
Because you've got to be able to explain. See, when we look during the Little Ice Age, which lasted from the 1300s to the mid-1800s, glaciers worldwide grew to their largest extent that they had been in over 10,000 years. When those glaciers began to melt, that was like
The early 1800s, the end of the Little Ice Age coincided almost precisely with the emergence of geological science and glaciological science. When Agassiz, Louis Agassiz, was kind of considered the godfather of glaciology, he was studying firsthand the effects of when the Little Ice Age glaciers were shrinking back.
So from that, they extrapolated to some of the similar effects of the great ice ages. But at that point, the thing was is that Well, a lot of the early geologists were catastrophists. That's something to circle back to. But the point is that when these ice sheets were melting back, you didn't have flows, discharges of 50 or 100 or 200 million cubic feet per second.
We haven't experienced anything like that in modern times, within historical times. I mean, when we're talking about, and we're going to look in a minute here at Grand Coulee, we're looking at the peak discharge that created Grand Coulee. It might have been 350 million cubic feet per second. Well, that's more. That's 10 times more than the combined flow of every single river on Earth.
We haven't seen anything like that in modern times. And I think part of the reason is, is modern times is a function of post-Ice Age meltdown. Okay, Ryan, let's go south. Come down. Okay, let's see. Go over to the west. Let's see. Go up there. Go up to Madison. Go up to Madison, and we're going to see that we zoom in. Let's see. Ah, there we go. Look over there to the right. Go east.
You're going to see there's a whole drumlin swarm there. And again, you're going to notice how it's diverging out. And then if you follow that up, you're going to see right up there, it goes up to, what is it, Lake Winnebago. And then it goes right up and it's like a continuation of that lake right there. That is Lake Winnebago, yes. And then if you follow that up,
It's a continuation of a large meltwater channel that produced what is now Green Bay. The land between the town of Green Bay and the northern rim of Winnebago is choked with sediment. If you were to sweep the sediment out, you would see that Winnebago is a continuation of Green Bay. All of that's under the ice sheet.
Then, as soon as you get, you can almost see right where the edge of the ice sheet was because that's where the terminus of the glacier swarm is. So if you go down, Ryan, back to the drumlin swarm that we saw, go south, yeah, go south right there, you see the drumlins. And you see how they're splayed out? Where they're just there.
So the water has been channelized forming green bay and lake Winnebago. And then if you go south there, it'll terminate. And that was the edge of the ice sheet. Yeah. So now we're beyond the ice sheet. And if you go to, uh, let's see. So Wisconsin river was a major conduit of that melt water that, that formed the, uh, that formed the, the Drumlin swarm there. Yeah, Wisconsin Rapids.
So I've been explored through that whole area there. And again, it's all catastrophic water flows. If you go up, let's see, to zoom out a little bit, Ryan. And let's see where we're at here. I'm trying to get oriented. Trying to look for Devil's Lake and the Wisconsin Dells. Stevens Point. Oh, Stevens Point. I actually went to a... a rock concert there in 1970.
Showing 1041–1060 of 1,469 · page 53 of 74
← Previous
Next →