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.
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Well... Okay, but I started formally studying geology in the 1970s. I've been out in the field with, God, I don't know, 15 or 20 geologists doing this kind of work. I've read thousands of geology papers. I've covered, I'm guessing, 200,000 miles in the field. And I figure I've put in enough time to have an opinion. I've earned the right to have an opinion on this.
Oh yeah. I mean, uh, the last tour I did of, of, of, uh, the Cumberland plateau in, uh, Tennessee and Kentucky showing evidence of catastrophic erosion. There was two geologists that came on there and they were well-established geologists. They weren't students. They were professional geologists. And I've ended up getting quite a few geologists that have come on these tours.
And, you know, sometimes they'll, they ask a lot of questions and, you know, which I appreciate because sometimes I'll get a different perspective or a different angle. But, you know, I'm usually at this point able to pretty much you know, explain, you know, we, we go out there and the evidence of the field is pretty, pretty convincing.
Well, the geologists that look at this admit, yeah. I mean, they acknowledge that, yeah, you're looking at... Victor Baker in 1973, when he was a grad, I think still a graduate student, he wrote a paper on his studies northeast of Spokane, Washington. And up to this point, nobody had ever done a detailed hydraulic analysis of these flows.
There was a couple of, you know, Brett's calculated flows in Washington, J.T. Pardee with the U.S. Geological Survey.
uh calculated flows in um in eastern montana western montana uh we're going to look at some slides here in a minute where i'm going to show you um in western montana there's gigantic flood features and there were two geologists bretts and party independently studying these two things and then in the 1950s geologists began to put those two things together
One of them, western Montana, was Glacial Lake Missoula, and then eastern Washington was the Channel Scablands. And see, the geological community has accepted the reality of what's termed the Missoula Flood. But it's my opinion that, again, that the focus is too limited here.
Now, I made, let's see, in 1999, I did my first transect up the Rocky Mountain Trench up to the headwaters of the Columbia, up to the headwaters of the Okanagan River. I followed the Fraser River down to where it discharges at Vancouver with my good friend and colleague, Brad Young. He's been with me, helping me with this research since the 90s. And, uh,
In every case, you could see the evidence for tremendous peak discharges and they're all headed towards the south. And when you see the maps, you know, it gets complicated, but where I diverge from the conventional view is that the conventional view looks at the sources. Everything is Lake Missoula from Western Montana. And I say, no, Lake Missoula was not really a lake.
It was just a temporary holding pond. But the ultimate source of the water was to the north. It was over British Columbia. It was the massive amounts. I mean, the Cordier and Ice Sheet from northern Washington up to Alaska could have been enormous. close to a million cubic miles.
The bottom third or fourth of it, which could have been several hundred thousand cubic miles, um, when it melted, it all had to discharge to the south. And, uh, Like if we go to this graphic, this is basically what we see now in terms of distribution of ice. You see ice over the Arctic Ocean. You see ice over Greenland. We don't see Antarctica, but Antarctica is the greatest mass of...
uh, of, of glacial ice and maybe 5 million cubic miles of ice roughly, I think. So the Greenland ice sheet that you see there, if we could pick that up and set it over the Western mountains of Canada and Northern United States, that would have been roughly about the same mass as the Cordier and ice sheet. If we look at the.
The Antarctic ice sheet on the South Pole, that was about the mass of the Laurentide ice sheet. The Laurentide ice sheet was roughly centered over what is now Hudson Bay. And so that was where the ice was at least a mile and a half thick. Well, with that much ice on the land, it compressed, called isostatic depression.
And the analogy I always use, look, we're sitting on these cushions right here, right? So it's creating an isostatic depression. And if we stand up, then you have isostatic compensation. The ice, it... rebounds, right? But as soon as we sit down, it compresses it.
So there are shorelines more than 1,000 feet above Hudson Bay, which were the result of the uplift of the land after the ice was removed, right? So Hudson Bay, think of that. That was roughly the center. Uh, the Southern, you see all of look where all of the great lakes were, they were all under the ice, the Laurentide ice sheet. Um, again, because the sea level is 400 feet lower.
If you go to the next slide, Ryan, we'll kind of get the configuration of 15 to 20,000 years ago during what's called the late glacial maximum. And. There is as much ice there that you would have to more than double the amount of glacial ice combined, Greenland and Antarctica. And it's all gone now. It's gone.
Now, the other question that's raised that's worthy of discussion is that in order to melt that ice, you have to have heat energy. And we won't have time to get into it today, but in the early 70s, geologists were looking at this and climatologists.
There was a group, there was two conferences held, one in 73 and I think one in 75, when after 20-some years of radiocarbon dating, it became apparent that the formation and disappearance of those ice sheets was way faster than anybody had imagined. Like, you know, there were forests apparently growing around Hudson Bay 40,000 years ago.
Well, the assumptions before that was that the Great Ice Sheet was at least 100,000 years old. Well, then it took tens of thousands of years to form, more tens of thousands of years to disappear. Well, if there's forests growing under where the center of the ice sheet is 35,000, 40,000 years ago... They had to rethink all the timelines.
Now, the problem was is they were using glacial recession rates that were extrapolated from the melting of the ice of the Little Ice Age, from the 1800s and so on. Well, now you're talking about tens of thousands of years. Well, now it suddenly became apparent that the disappearance of the ice was way quicker than anybody had imagined.
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