Image credit: NASA
Ice age flooding, recreated in models.
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Earth’s last major ice age locked up gargantuan amounts of water in vast glaciers, says Science Alert.
Once they melted, it was a spectacle to behold as tremendous floods gouged channels into the face of the planet.
The remnants of one of the largest of these ancient deluges are still visible in eastern Washington, in an area now known as the Channeled Scablands.
For a long time, geologists have been struggling to understand the dynamic properties of these floods, until a recent key insight was made.
These ancient glaciers were so large and heavy, they actually tilted Earth’s crust beneath them – when weight was released due to melting, the land would have moved too, changing the course of the megaflood.
Using modeling of ancient megafloods, researchers decided to test whether glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) – deflections…
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