Snow, Ice, Avalanches, and Glaciers - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 211

ing into the nearby Situk River, a prime salmon fishery. Plans were made to blast the toe
of the glacier to drain the fjord and save the Situk. Nature intervened, and the Hubbard
Glacier snout was overtopped on 14 August before the Situk could flood. The outpour-
ing at the mouth of the Hubbard produced the second-largest observed GLOF in history
(Motyka and Truffer 2007).
The magnitude of glacial outbursts found from prehistoric times is almost unbeliev-
able. In fact, early researchers like J. Harlan Bretz and J. T. Pardee had trouble con-
vincing other scientists of their day that floods of such magnitude could occur. Large
marginal lakes had formed adjacent to the ends of the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice-
sheet glaciers during the Pleistocene. The Great Lakes of North America are remnants
of some of those lakes. To the west of the Great Lakes were other equally impressive
glacially dammed lakes like Missoula, Spokane, and Columbia. In a complex series of gi-
ant GLOFs, Lake Missoula and others overtopped their glacial dams, sending mammoth
floods down the course of the Columbia River and some of its tributaries in present-
day eastern Washington. These mega-floods eroded thousands of square miles into giant
gorges, scour channels, ripples, and other flood features in what is today called the
channeled scablands (Bretz 1923).
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