Spanning seven states from British Columbia to northwestern Utah, the Columbia River Basin is a vast combination of mountains, canyons, rolling uplands and desert basins joined by the Columbia River and its dozens of tributaries. Many people marvel at the scenic beauty, but what they may not realize is how much of it is the result of a series of monumental natural disasters.
Approximately 13,000 years after these disasters, the University is paying tribute to the Ice Age Missoula Floods with “The Flood Zone – Landscapes Sculpted by the Glacial Lake Missoula Floods,” a photography exhibit at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History that will run until March.
“The Flood Zone” is a series of photos depicting the landscapes carved by the cataclysmic Missoula Floods, the most powerful in the earth’s history.
At roughly half the volume of Lake Michigan, the prehistoric Glacial Lake Missoula of western Montana was the largest lake ever to be formed by an ice dam. As the ice dam ruptured over time, the lake eventually drained as water periodically burst through.
Over two millennia, an estimated 40 floods swept across eastern Washington at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the world’s rivers.
The floods, which reached as far as the Willamette Valley, reshaped the Columbia River Basin in Washington and created the Wallula Gap and the Drumheller Channels, among others.
“Usually when we’ve done this stuff, what peaks people’s interest is to imagine that it really wasn’t that long ago,” said Ann Craig, assistant director of education at the museum.
All 12 images were shot by Bill Woolston, the dean of the University of Idaho’s College of Art & Architecture, who will be at the museum for an artist’s reception on Sept. 21.
Woolston, who studied geology at Princeton University, became interested in the effects of the Missoula Floods after traveling through the area.
“The landscape fascinated me, so I started doing some research on it with the help of fellow geologists and I started photographing,” he said.
Woolston used a camera with a rotating panorama lens, allowing him to take pictures with a 140-degree field of view, comparable to human vision. Printed on acid-free archival paper, his work is also curved to accentuate the three-dimensional nature of the landscapes.
“I think they’re beautiful and I think they give a good visual of how the formation looks now,” said Judi Pruitt, the museum’s program coordinator. “(Woolston’s) talent in photography is a really unique format that I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing. You don’t see photo exhibits like that every day.”
The majority of Woolston’s subjects exist in the triangular area between Spokane, Walla Walla and Yakima, Wash., the area that was hit hardest by the floods.
“Cache Crater” and “Amphitheater Crater,” both in Odessa, Wash., look as though they were created by meteors. “Palouse Falls” depicts a 200-foot waterfall. And “Cherry Creek Coulee,” Craig’s favorite photo, shows an extremely deep, wide ravine.
“I love it,” Craig said. “I think it’s very easy to picture in this image where the water came through. The whole area would have been a huge river as a 1,000 foot wall of water comes down at 50 miles per hour.”
Woolston, for his part, is attached to all of the images and can’t pick just one favorite.
“I’m proud of the work,” he said. “It’s most satisfying to have the material available to a wide audience so they can understand what happened 13,000 years ago.”
To keep with the exhibit’s ice age theme, “The Flood Zone” also features numerous fossils, donated to the University by its first geology professor, Thomas Condon, upon his death in 1907.
Fossils on display include dire wolf skulls, the claw of a giant sloth and a massive mammoth tusk, which is roughly the size of a small tree trunk.
“Our fossils enhance the exhibit and kind of tie it together,” Pruitt said. “They really tell the complete story.”
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Photography exhibit sheds light on past natural disasters
Daily Emerald
September 16, 2007
Courtesy of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History
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