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
And that outwash plane from the discharge of Grand Coulee came all the way down and Moses Lake is in that discharge plane. And what you'll see there too is also something else that we call a paleocurrent indicator. Because if you have one of these outwashes, You can picture this.
When the water is forceful with a lot of power, the stuff that it's picking up is going to be very coarse, bouldery, you know. Once it slows down, what do you think that drops out first? The bigger stuff. And then as you get progressively down current, as the current gets weaker and spread out, you get a finer and finer grain of sediment.
So if you look at a big outwash plane or a bar that's created a delta fan, you'll see that the up current has the biggest rocks, and then it gets progressively finer as you move down current. So that's one way you call that a paleo current, the ancient current indicator, because what I do, and when I take people out on these, these tours is w we like follow the routes of the flood.
Um, I've probably been over this landscape as much or more than anyone else in the world, actually. I mean, I've been over this back and forth over this landscape I don't know, 30 times, 40 times, I've lost count. I've taken hundreds of people out. I've been on... many geologists guided field trips. And a lot of them have been really knowledgeable.
I've come away with greater insight, but at the same time, I'm, I'm coming away with this thought. They're not looking at the big picture. Like they're, they're, they're thinking it's confined to this one region. They're not, for example, connecting anything that happened here with the Drumlin swarm over by Lake Ontario. See, that's not happening yet. That's what I'm trying to get.
We got to look at the big picture.
It needs to be public knowledge.
Because. When we start talking about environmental change and climatic change and all of that, If you don't recognize this agency, and what we're looking at here, I think, is only like the most recent incarnation of these events. Yeah, we're missing the major part of the big picture. Right.
And all of our, you know, our conjecturing and surmising about things is going to be woefully incomplete until we start taking these larger steps and realize that, well, yeah, the Younger Dryas and the termination of the last Ice Age is the most recent manifestation of events on this scale, but there have been others. Sure, yeah. Of course, one of the things that I look at
is, you know, if you're using it as a yardstick, is species loss. Yeah, I was just thinking that.
Species loss is a direct result, a direct function of habitat loss. Habitat loss is going to be the direct result of catastrophic events. And we have to go back at least 3 million years to find a species loss on the scale of the terminal Pleistocene, all the big creatures we were just seeing.
Exactly. Yeah, because if we talk about Pleistocene mammalia, North America lost three-quarters of its megafauna. We define megafauna as 44 kilograms body weight, which is about 100 pounds. So North America and South America both lost about three-quarters of their megamammals. Eurasia lost about 35%, and Africa lost about 10%. What does that tell you?
Tells you that, you know, if there was one place that probably was the least dramatically affected by these changes, it was African. It was probably like the Eastern African highlands around Kenya and that area, the great rift zone. That area I think was kind of a refugium, if you will. Um, Northern Africa, I think got blasted, you know, uh, the Nile river, uh,
Same thing, there were gigantic floods flowing north into the eastern Mediterranean, dated right there to the Younger Dryas, 12,000, 13,000 years ago. Several papers I've read, one of them was called, you know, referred to it as the Wild Nile. Another paper is actually going back to the 1800s, where they discovered freshwater, like Serena Flores, Cerano fluvialis, I believe it's called.
It was a type of freshwater mussel that lives, or snail, I forget which, that lives in the modern Nile. And they've found deposits of these guys 150 feet above the modern floodplain of the Nile. They've also found huge deposits in the eastern Mediterranean that looked like it was outwashed from the Nile. So there were apparently major floods in the Nile River.
Pretty much every river on earth at some point. Certainly all the rivers in North America. I haven't found a single river in North America that's not in an underfit to its valley, its channel that it's flowing in. So, but when you get to some of these rivers, like the ones we've been looking at here, Grand Coulee and all, we're looking at direct discharge from the ice sheets.
However, we can see evidence for gigantic flows and floods that were far removed from the ice sheets. So we can't blame it directly on rapid melting of the ice sheets. But, I mean, it has to be pluvial, meaning rainfall, extreme rainfall.
who's oh i'm sure there's somebody uh give me some you know if i start thinking about it there's there's a small but growing list and i've noticed that um there's definitely a new generation of geology students i've gotten quite a few contacts from yeah i'm enrolled in geology and you know at such and such university and what you're saying seems to make more sense to me than
Yeah, I think it's happening. It's probably going to take another decade or so.
I know, but I'm really trying to... You are.
Showing 1101–1120 of 1,469 · page 56 of 74
← Previous
Next →