Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
other geologists to believe him. Geologists had so thoroughly denied the existence of great
floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence for one.
A controversial figure throughout his career, Bretz won no awards until long after he re-
tired and his most influential and vociferous critics died. There was no volume written by
distinguished colleagues to honor his career. He was an outsider, a heretic dismissed by the
scientific establishment. A classic field geologist, Bretz figured out the story of the region's
giant glacial floods, seeing what others at first could not and then would not see to sort out
the pieces of a landscape-scale jigsaw puzzle.
Bretz became unpopular when he questioned orthodox uniformitarianism, Lyell's dictate
that the processes of today are the same as those of the past. Fresh out of graduate school
and perhaps not knowing any better, Bretz identified compelling evidence for a gigantic
flood. A reluctant heretic, he insisted on valuing field evidence above theory, piecing to-
gether the story of how a raging wall of water hundreds of feet high roared across eastern
Washington, carving deep channels before cascading down the Columbia River gorge as a
wall of water high enough to turn Oregon's Willamette Valley into a vast backwater lake.
This time it was the scientific community that refused to see the evidence. Vying to be the
first to prove himself wrong, Bretz kept digging. But as he kept finding more evidence of
a really big flood, the geological establishment kept coming up with ways of explaining it
away.
Bretz taught in his native Michigan before heading west to teach high school in Seattle.
A field enthusiast, he spent his weekends and summers studying the geology around Puget
Sound as well as glaciers in the nearby Cascade Range. Eventually he enrolled at the
University of Chicago, graduating
summa cum laude
with a PhD based on western Wash-
ington's glacial geology in 1913. After spending a year on the faculty of the University of
Washington, where his colleagues did not appreciate his enthusiasm for fieldwork, he ac-
cepted an invitation to return to Chicago, where he taught until he retired in 1947. Dedic-
ated to teaching geology in the field and enamored with the landscapes of eastern Wash-
ington, he started bringing summer classes to the Columbia River gorge.
There Bretz found exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above
the highest recorded river level. Glaciers could not have carried these boulders to these
elevations. Geological evidence had already proven glaciers had never reached the gorge.
