"2 Minute Geology"

COLUMBIA RIVER BASALTS: More than 300 lava flows that buried much of the Pacific Northwest! A stack of basalt lava layers more than 2 miles thick that stretches from Idaho to the Pacific Ocean.

WHAT IS A COULEE?: Dramatic coulees – Grand Coulee, Moses Coulee, Frenchman Coulee - of eastern Washington’s Channeled Scablands were created by powerful Ice Age Floods that dug aggressively into cracked lava flows!

WHITE BLUFFS: Soft layers of ancient sediment chock full of Miocene fossils! Exotic rocks from the Ice Age Floods! The White Bluffs tower over a wild stretch of the Columbia River at the Hanford Reach.

COLUMNAR BASALT: Perfect rock columns created by cooling lava 10 million years ago! Columnar cracking in the Drumheller Channels of eastern Washington.

PALOUSE RIVER CANYON: A legacy of powerful Ice Age Flooding! Majestic Palouse Falls in the Palouse River Canyon deep in the rolling hill country of eastern Washington.

ENTRENCHED MEANDERS: A lazy, curving river that has cut deeply in central Washington crust! The Yakima River Canyon is a textbook example of tectonic forces battling a river course.

PILLOW BASALT: 100-foot-thick lavas pushing across lakes of the inland Pacific Northwest! Drama long ago recorded by pillow zones and crumbly orange rock at the base of basalt layers.

WENATCHEE VALLEY: Ice Age Floods loaded with rocks, boulders, and icebergs cruised down the Columbia River and over the city of Wenatchee! A 600-foot giant flood bar sits beneath the city – and a trail of ice-rafted erratics extends up the Wenatchee River into the Cascade Range.

ICE-RAFTED ERRATICS: Large exotic boulders sit in the desert landscapes of eastern Washington. How did they get here? The Ice Age Floods swept them in on massive surges of floodwater from hundreds of miles away!

SEATTLE FAULT: Evidence for a large 900 A.D. earthquake in Seattle! The Seattle Fault is one of many newly discovered shallow faults in Washington’s Puget Sound.