When my head isn't smoking, gears are turning in my head watching this. I find myself Googling so many basic geology terms like varve, intrusion, gypsum precipitation, injection, sills, diamicttite (sp?), coulees, etc. Thanks for letting me hang over the shoulder of two masters of their fields.
Nick, I want back to watch the 1 hour mark and it’s really mind blowing to hear Brian discuss that Bretz had agreement about the prior cutting of Moses coulee. Thanks for pointing this out
WOW, I could watch Brian go on and on, he seems so excited he jumps around looking for the next clue postulating how the puzzle pieces could fit together. Thank you Nick, thank you Brian!
Thank you for sharing this outing and BIG THANK YOU to Mr. Atwater for giving more clues to what HE see's when looking at a lake shore deposit. Most interesting! Thanks Nick
Agree 100%, watching Dr. Atwater in real time explain what's going on on that cliff is amazing. Show this to get students motivated prior to doing field work. You could send 1000 different geology majors to this site, and most would be clueless. I just see dirt, Dr. Atwater sees and explains thousands of years of geology.
Brilliant! 3rd time watching this, will watch again, had to say Thank You. Nick and Brian, your time and knowledge are so valuable. To see environment that could be gone tomorrow, priceless.
It’s amazing watching and hearing Brians thought processes and methodology. I’m delighted to have had him share his vast experience, knowledge and enthusiasm with us. It gives me some insight as to how sediment is interpreted. I’m grateful for you sharing the experience.
OMG. I am reading FULL RIP 9.0 (Sandi Doughton) and the 2nd chapter starts with the name: BRIAN ATWATER. Believe me, folks. After you read the 1st chapter, this man's name, BRIAN ATWATER, comes into full focus. You GET it, why Nick Zentner mentions this scientist in his videos. Jiminy! Total Respect and Gratitude to you both. And let's hope Cascadia slumbers into millenia.
I really like this guy, fun to watch. He really enjoys what he is doing and it shows. Makes it fun for the viewer. I hope to see him again in a future video. Thanks Nick for sharing.
Brian's enthusiasm is infectious! This guy needs to share his love of the physical world so more people can learn from his wealth of information and practical application.
I thought I a good handle on this stuff and Brian just blew my mind. Big THANKS to Brian and Nick for showing me just how little I actually know. Very exciting!
back again w/nick and Brian Monday, July 17, 2023: never gets old; still v/enjoyable: next will be Richard Waite /GSA and Bretz begins his stories via nick
What a phenomenal presentation. The skill of the videographer, field technique and observations from a maestro, set along the mighty Columbia. I feel really insignificant now.
This reminds me of dad in the field. Giving a convincing story of what's going on and at the end, when you think you have a complete story, out came the " or maybe that's not what happened" !
OMG, fascinating and beautiful, and engaging. What surprises me is the continual questioning of possible scenarios, (which is somehow reassuring)! 👏🏼 New word: Diamict ... 😊 Thank you!
So nice to see Nick with his buddies and makes me feel like they are our friends too. Thanks Brian for taking the time to make this video so enjoyable mostly because you are such a gentleman like all the USGS geologists are while teaching me something new and reminding me of previous publications I need to review again. Have a happy 60th birthday coming up );
A fantastic video with so much information, I'll have to watch it 3 or 4 times. But it just kind of faded out. I assume your battery died. Hopefully you brought two and there will be a continuation of this great field trip. Thanks for doing this and sharing it with us. And a special thanks to Brian Atwater for his expertise. It looked like you were having the time of your life. :) Be well.
Fantastic! Reminds me of boating on Lake Roosevelt and observing those very same sediment exposure types. I wish you guys would get on a boat and cruise the Lake Roosevelt shoreline for a video, especially up the Spokane Arm. There are massive lakebed rip ups of the old Lake Columbia up there on the south shore near Porcupine Bay. As I recall, they were something like 6 feet or more high. Just imagine turning a swirled cinnamon roll on its side and looking straight at it. They were wonderful whorls of Missoula sand and Columbia clays. Also a giant sequence of rhythmites a good 20 feet high from a massive growing sandbar during one of the floods just east of Porcupine Bay where the lake gets really narrow.
This is just an extraordinary piece Nick. Thanks to my having hung out with you so much the last year or so, I understand just enough of this to really appreciate how cool it is. The thing I like best about geology is trying to understand the landscape and picture the events over time that formed it. I'm not so good at remembering the names of things, but love the big story. When I look at something, I want to know why. I would never get to participate in an outing like this in real life without you bringing me along. My humble thanks to you and Brian for this treat. I hope you will discuss this further some time as I always have questions....which is why this is so cool because I'm looking at this stuff while having it interpreted by experts in real time. And... always remember, you might need those knees to get back. Good advice.
I'm kinda like you in that regard -- I'm into the MACRO-geology, not the micro-stuff. What Dr. Atwater and Nick dive into is very nuanced minutiae that add up to this big picture that I'm _most_ interested in. Within the micro is the evidence, within the evidence is the whole of the story. _That's_ what I'm into, not the parts that make up the whole, but the whole itself.
It is all new to me. Thanks to the knowledge and experience of Brian Atwater, and Nicks reflections regarding Brian's explanation. I have gained a greater picture of what may have happened in the distant past. I could spend all day looking at these sediments. Oh well, ran out of battery.
This shows what I imagined being a geologist is like. Very awesome video. Detectives looking for evidence and then piecing together the story of what happened. I bet technology could be developed to analyze varve strata and automatically identify unique chemistry fingerprints of each layer in the sequence. Then by identifying the same chemistry sequence elsewhere, they could be identified as at the same time. Think of it like identifying tree ring sequences that correspond due to similar sequences of thick and thin rings; but instead, several sediment components in each layer (including their density ratios) could provide a unique fingerprint for each layer. And if five sequential deposit layers match the fingerprint of 5 layers from another site, then they are matched in time and event. With unique fingerprints, multiple samples of 10 strata layers could then be overlapped and assembled into a complete time line. We need a lab that can quickly analyze lots of samples, similar to how Antarctic ice cores are analyzed and then assembled into a complete sequence the way Ancient DNA fragment sequences are analyzed & assembled.
This field video expanded so much in its questions, as much as the hypothesis. The idea of the transience of varves through major, or even minor, events is so, so interesting. Mystery Diamect. Drop Stones. I also love the incongruity of the thought of long geologic time interrupted by events spanning less than a single decade. Thank you for sharing with us enthusiasts, as well as your students.
The deposits of 1foot thick layer of unsorted rocks could come from local landslides?? Landslides possibly caused by a pool of water breaching on top of iceberg??--from Gene Oh, WOW amazing experiences you guys brought to viewers, Brian and Nick! Thank You!! I love Brian's enthusiasm to go and still going head on to solve mysteries of Ice Age Floods, SO cool!!!
They should link this video to the GSA field trip description. Fantastic video! 21k viewings (and counting) speaks to your skills Nick, and an under-appreciated demand for quality science videos. Thanks for sharing! (The best way to establish varves in my opinion is to show thickness correlations over many kms. Turbidites should be more localized and heavily influenced by the bathymetry. Those "varves" change significantly between 40 and 47:30 min - that was the same bed, right?)
It’s not hard to get those flood deposits up at pangborn, etc if the land is depressed as Atwater mentions, from glacial isostatic loading! They should re-run those simulations with a glacial isostasy loading parameter and use the mantle deformation rates to calculate timing, based on the necessary hydrological conditions to create the deposits. Or at least to establish bounds on timing, then maybe you can get some answers on when the ice retreated from grand coulee, for instance. Wow, some really beautiful sedimentology there, hidden in the shadow of such an impressive rock. Love those varves overlying the beautiful ripples. The varve/mud injectites speak to the instantaneous nature of the flood deposits IMO. so much sediment deposited so quickly on unlithified, wet sediment loads it, and causes the saturated sediment trapped below to flow as an overpressured liquid up into the bed above, and also is caused by dewatering structures. Another explanation for that diamict (if it’s not a till) landslide/debris flows caused by destabilization of the land after flood scouring. But if there’s drop stones loading sediments underneath then it likely is glacial. And if it’s glacial, then that seems to imply ice advance, and lots of icebergs... Also the coulee could have started to get cut during a previous glacial maximum, and there may have been cycles of glacial outburst floods during that time that then got scoured completely away and filled by the Missoula floods of the LGM ;) Video stops right at the tillite money shot! Haha. Really appreciate this video, Nick. So much to read here, apologies for getting excited with this long comment.
I always wondered about this... I know they are having problems getting enough water to fill the high points. I also wonder if those high points are from the earliest floods when the floor of the Scablands wasn't as carved out like the later floods.
When my head isn't smoking, gears are turning in my head watching this. I find myself Googling so many basic geology terms like varve, intrusion, gypsum precipitation, injection, sills, diamicttite (sp?), coulees, etc. Thanks for letting me hang over the shoulder of two masters of their fields.
All you geology fans...I am watching all the A to Z episodes again and I am getting so much more the second time around!
I did that about a month ago as well.
Same!
Can you point me to these?
it sounds so boring ....
can't stop watching
🤣🤣🤣
What a legend, Brian Atwater, retired and now working on glacial geomorphology in his spare time.
Just imagine being a young geologist assigned to help him on a project. Wow. This is a wonderful video that truly needs to be preserved.
Nick, I want back to watch the 1 hour mark and it’s really mind blowing to hear Brian discuss that Bretz had agreement about the prior cutting of Moses coulee. Thanks for pointing this out
WOW, I could watch Brian go on and on, he seems so excited he jumps around looking for the next clue postulating how the puzzle pieces could fit together. Thank you Nick, thank you Brian!
Thank you for sharing this outing and BIG THANK YOU to Mr. Atwater for giving more clues to what HE see's when looking at a lake shore deposit. Most interesting! Thanks Nick
Still a kid at 70! What a guy!
This is all amazing insight; geologist-to-geologist banter. This is gold, seeing how much they both enjoy their profession.
Blows my mind on how complicated ice age deposits are!
I sure hope we get to see more videos of Nick and Brian together like this! That was excellent!! Thank you so much for this!
Thank you Nick.Thank you Brian.A beautiful day in the sage....with water and ROCKS.....
The biggest take away from the class today is the power of observation, GREAT WORK
What an irrepressible soul! You can’t fake that kind of passion. What a treasure of a human! Thanks Nick for sharing him with us.
An hour of bliss!
Dr. Atwater is a genius! Every geology student taking a class that involves field study should watch this. Thank you Brian and Nick!!
Agree 100%, watching Dr. Atwater in real time explain what's going on on that cliff is amazing. Show this to get students motivated prior to doing field work. You could send 1000 different geology majors to this site, and most would be clueless. I just see dirt, Dr. Atwater sees and explains thousands of years of geology.
Washington state is so beautiful.
Thanks for sharing these field trips w/us Nick.
Brian's input is fantastic.
Appreciate you both so much.
Brilliant! 3rd time watching this, will watch again, had to say Thank You. Nick and Brian, your time and knowledge are so valuable. To see environment that could be gone tomorrow, priceless.
Wonderful experience for us! Thanks.
Thanks for taking us townies along with you.
Yet another great glimpse of a Field geologist at work. Very interesting to see both the evidence and interpretations.
What a storyteller!
Thanks for the fun walk with geologic interpretations. A lot more interesting than going by yourself and looking at something and not understanding it
Thanks Nick & Brian - very instructive!
What an interesting man is Brian Atwater😉 He carries a lot of knowledge and valuable information for the young ones that are up and coming 👍🏽❣️
It doesn't get any better than this!!! A new Scablands story in the making. Absolutely stunning!! Thank you so much!!
Excellent lesson
Man he has the fever! I didn’t want it to end! Especially when you know he is going to keep talking! Great video!
It’s amazing watching and hearing Brians thought processes and methodology. I’m delighted to have had him share his vast experience, knowledge and enthusiasm with us. It gives me some insight as to how sediment is interpreted. I’m grateful for you sharing the experience.
Thanks for another opportunity to learn!
Thank you for the videos with Brian Atwater, he is amazing, a pleasure to listen to!
Spectacular field trip. Thank you.
Wow! I am breathless trying to keep up with Brian Atwater. What an interesting day at the 'beach'. Thanks Nick and Brian, for sharing.
OMG. I am reading FULL RIP 9.0 (Sandi Doughton) and the 2nd chapter starts with the name: BRIAN ATWATER. Believe me, folks. After you read the 1st chapter, this man's name, BRIAN ATWATER, comes into full focus. You GET it, why Nick Zentner mentions this scientist in his videos. Jiminy! Total Respect and Gratitude to you both. And let's hope Cascadia slumbers into millenia.
Thank you Nick and Brian
Instant classic. Thanks for documenting and sharing Brian Atwater in his element.
Brian and Nick are amazing individuals, they have way too much fun playing in the mud
This is so great. I wish other disciplines did this as well. So open, transparent, accessible.
Wonderful outing! Great set of geologists!
This is so great. Thanks, you two.
Been out of touch for awhile but came across this episode. Nick...so interesting...thanks!
I really like this guy, fun to watch. He really enjoys what he is doing and it shows. Makes it fun for the viewer. I hope to see him again in a future video. Thanks Nick for sharing.
Just wow! Brian is an absolute badass!
I continue to learn from Nick, and guest geologists. Thank you.
This video really makes me wish I'd been a geologist. What a great, charming guide!
Wow! Nick, you are in rarified company!
Just awesome. Thank you both so much. Love this keep it coming Nick.
Very much to learn from this field trip. Thank you for this amazing video.
I could watch this all day ! Thank you for taking us along
Listening to a scientist think out loud... Wonderful and very generous of him.
Overwhelmingly insightful and to "tag along" on a field trip with such knowledge, passion and drive; to learn.... Thank you Brian. Thank you Nick!!
Oh that was such a rare treat spending time with Brian and following along with his thinking as he digs around in the field. Awesome.
Brian's like a kid in a candy shop. He clearly enjoys what he's doing.
both of them actually
Thank you Nick,always waiting for a new field video.
“No, we both have old knees. We’ll need those knees to get back.” Ha!
Brian's enthusiasm is infectious! This guy needs to share his love of the physical world so more people can learn from his wealth of information and practical application.
Thank you for posting this, Nick. Utterly delightful to watch him and listen to him. His enthusiasm is infectious.
What a wonderful field trip. Brian is quite a treasure. Thank you for taking the time to shoot this video and for sharing it with us.
Brian Atwater - the Energizer Bunny has 'nothing' on this man. Simply amazing his knowledge and ENERGY.
We enjoyed this episode so much. Brian is amazing !
Well, I caught parts of that, sure enjoyed it and didn't want it to end. Thank you
Wow wonder place great day to be out! Great too see such enthusiasm and Mr. Atwater is doing great so full of energy.
I thought I a good handle on this stuff and Brian just blew my mind. Big THANKS to Brian and Nick for showing me just how little I actually know. Very exciting!
Really interesting layers of TIME. …neat stuff .. thanks to you both !
Fascinating to see Brian at work discovering and interpreting! Very exciting! Thanks Nick! 👌👍
back again w/nick and Brian Monday, July 17, 2023: never gets old; still v/enjoyable: next will be Richard Waite /GSA and Bretz begins his stories via nick
What a phenomenal presentation.
The skill of the videographer, field technique and observations from a maestro, set along the mighty Columbia.
I feel really insignificant now.
This reminds me of dad in the field. Giving a convincing story of what's going on and at the end, when you think you have a complete story, out came the " or maybe that's not what happened" !
OMG, fascinating and beautiful, and engaging. What surprises me is the continual questioning of possible scenarios, (which is somehow reassuring)! 👏🏼 New word: Diamict ... 😊
Thank you!
Thanks for putting this together and sharing it with us!
Brilliant. Looks like a lot of fun!
Great show with Brian. Many thanks
So nice to see Nick with his buddies and makes me feel like they are our friends too.
Thanks Brian for taking the time to make this video so enjoyable mostly because you are such a gentleman like all the USGS geologists are while teaching me something new and reminding me of previous publications I need to review again. Have a happy 60th birthday coming up );
Wow this was fun. Good camera work too, giving us very good looks at the cuts.
A fantastic video with so much information, I'll have to watch it 3 or 4 times. But it just kind of faded out. I assume your battery died. Hopefully you brought two and there will be a continuation of this great field trip. Thanks for doing this and sharing it with us. And a special thanks to Brian Atwater for his expertise. It looked like you were having the time of your life. :) Be well.
Fantastic! Reminds me of boating on Lake Roosevelt and observing those very same sediment exposure types. I wish you guys would get on a boat and cruise the Lake Roosevelt shoreline for a video, especially up the Spokane Arm. There are massive lakebed rip ups of the old Lake Columbia up there on the south shore near Porcupine Bay. As I recall, they were something like 6 feet or more high. Just imagine turning a swirled cinnamon roll on its side and looking straight at it. They were wonderful whorls of Missoula sand and Columbia clays. Also a giant sequence of rhythmites a good 20 feet high from a massive growing sandbar during one of the floods just east of Porcupine Bay where the lake gets really narrow.
WOW…. What a great tour with the famous Brian Atwater and hear his thinking!
This is just an extraordinary piece Nick. Thanks to my having hung out with you so much the last year or so, I understand just enough of this to really appreciate how cool it is. The thing I like best about geology is trying to understand the landscape and picture the events over time that formed it. I'm not so good at remembering the names of things, but love the big story. When I look at something, I want to know why. I would never get to participate in an outing like this in real life without you bringing me along. My humble thanks to you and Brian for this treat. I hope you will discuss this further some time as I always have questions....which is why this is so cool because I'm looking at this stuff while having it interpreted by experts in real time. And... always remember, you might need those knees to get back. Good advice.
I'm kinda like you in that regard -- I'm into the MACRO-geology, not the micro-stuff. What Dr. Atwater and Nick dive into is very nuanced minutiae that add up to this big picture that I'm _most_ interested in. Within the micro is the evidence, within the evidence is the whole of the story. _That's_ what I'm into, not the parts that make up the whole, but the whole itself.
GREAT STUFF!!! Cheers from Lewiston, Idaho"
Wow.! Ur at one of my fave places.! Love steamboat rock.! So beautiful there.!
This is absolutely fantastic! Geology has been interest since I was a kid.
It is all new to me. Thanks to the knowledge and experience of Brian Atwater, and Nicks reflections regarding Brian's explanation. I have gained a greater picture of what may have happened in the distant past. I could spend all day looking at these sediments. Oh well, ran out of battery.
Awesome! Thanks a lot for sharing such memorable time!
This shows what I imagined being a geologist is like. Very awesome video. Detectives looking for evidence and then piecing together the story of what happened.
I bet technology could be developed to analyze varve strata and automatically identify unique chemistry fingerprints of each layer in the sequence. Then by identifying the same chemistry sequence elsewhere, they could be identified as at the same time. Think of it like identifying tree ring sequences that correspond due to similar sequences of thick and thin rings; but instead, several sediment components in each layer (including their density ratios) could provide a unique fingerprint for each layer. And if five sequential deposit layers match the fingerprint of 5 layers from another site, then they are matched in time and event. With unique fingerprints, multiple samples of 10 strata layers could then be overlapped and assembled into a complete time line. We need a lab that can quickly analyze lots of samples, similar to how Antarctic ice cores are analyzed and then assembled into a complete sequence the way Ancient DNA fragment sequences are analyzed & assembled.
Absolutely fascinating
This field video expanded so much in its questions, as much as the hypothesis. The idea of the transience of varves through major, or even minor, events is so, so interesting. Mystery Diamect. Drop Stones. I also love the incongruity of the thought of long geologic time interrupted by events spanning less than a single decade. Thank you for sharing with us enthusiasts, as well as your students.
I especially love Brian Atwater's... "Moving on..." mentality. Conveys so much, in such precious time. It's the excitement I get amped by.
The deposits of 1foot thick layer of unsorted rocks could come from local landslides?? Landslides possibly caused by a pool of water breaching on top of iceberg??--from Gene
Oh, WOW amazing experiences you guys brought to viewers, Brian and Nick! Thank You!! I love Brian's enthusiasm to go and still going head on to solve mysteries of Ice Age Floods, SO cool!!!
My nose is on my screen, looking at Brian's scrapings. Dang, it's fascinating. What a total blast this is. Brian's enthusiasm is off the charts. Wow.
Loved this discussion
They should link this video to the GSA field trip description. Fantastic video! 21k viewings (and counting) speaks to your skills Nick, and an under-appreciated demand for quality science videos. Thanks for sharing! (The best way to establish varves in my opinion is to show thickness correlations over many kms. Turbidites should be more localized and heavily influenced by the bathymetry. Those "varves" change significantly between 40 and 47:30 min - that was the same bed, right?)
Isn't this a profoundly beautiful planet!😊
Love this series of field geologists at work. Looking at evidence and trying various stories to explain what is going on.
Love your work
Oh, that ended too soon. You were just getting to that rock layer. So much good information.
It’s not hard to get those flood deposits up at pangborn, etc if the land is depressed as Atwater mentions, from glacial isostatic loading! They should re-run those simulations with a glacial isostasy loading parameter and use the mantle deformation rates to calculate timing, based on the necessary hydrological conditions to create the deposits. Or at least to establish bounds on timing, then maybe you can get some answers on when the ice retreated from grand coulee, for instance.
Wow, some really beautiful sedimentology there, hidden in the shadow of such an impressive rock. Love those varves overlying the beautiful ripples.
The varve/mud injectites speak to the instantaneous nature of the flood deposits IMO. so much sediment deposited so quickly on unlithified, wet sediment loads it, and causes the saturated sediment trapped below to flow as an overpressured liquid up into the bed above, and also is caused by dewatering structures.
Another explanation for that diamict (if it’s not a till) landslide/debris flows caused by destabilization of the land after flood scouring. But if there’s drop stones loading sediments underneath then it likely is glacial. And if it’s glacial, then that seems to imply ice advance, and lots of icebergs...
Also the coulee could have started to get cut during a previous glacial maximum, and there may have been cycles of glacial outburst floods during that time that then got scoured completely away and filled by the Missoula floods of the LGM ;)
Video stops right at the tillite money shot! Haha. Really appreciate this video, Nick. So much to read here, apologies for getting excited with this long comment.
I always wondered about this... I know they are having problems getting enough water to fill the high points. I also wonder if those high points are from the earliest floods when the floor of the Scablands wasn't as carved out like the later floods.
@@swirvinbirds1971 yeah could be
you guys rock!
That is an absolutely gorgeous landscape.
That must be so exciting to walk around and to understand what going on with the earth around you
Wow! I could listen to Brian talk all day long.
Fascinating. Thank you!