Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood

Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood

by John Soennichsen
Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood

Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood

by John Soennichsen

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Overview

The masterful story of the scientific rebel who dared to think outside the box—and changed the course of geologic history
 
The land between Idaho and the Cascade Mountains is characterized by gullies, coulees, and deserts—in geologic terms, it is a wholly unique place on the earth. In the 1920s, legendary geologist and professor J Harlen Bretz peered back in time to answer the riddle of how this land came to be, becoming one of the first people to explore the area. Defying the conventional wisdom of his peers, Bretz saw a landscape that had been instantly scoured by a flood of unprecedented scale. Though met with public and academic humiliation—his theory sounded too much like the biblical flood—Bretz persevered and went on to discover what everyone else had failed to see.
 
Bretz's Flood tells the dramatic story of this scientific maverick—how he came to study the region, his radical theory that a huge flood created it, and how the mainstream geologic community campaigned to derail him from pursuing an idea that satellite photos would confirm decades later.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781570616310
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Publication date: 09/15/2009
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 203,877
Product dimensions: 5.56(w) x 8.56(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

John Soennichsen is the author of Live! From Death Valley and Bretz's Flood. He has written more than 250 articles, essays, and short fiction pieces for a variety of regional and national magazines and newspapers. John's bachelor's degree in journalism is from the University of Oregon and his master of fine arts in creative writing is from Eastern Washington University. He lives with his family on a five-acre ranch just outside the Eastern Washington town of Cheney.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

An Introduction to the Scablands xi

Part 1 First Steps

Chapter 1 Birth of an Obsession 3

Chapter 2 Bright: Prospects and Early Disappointments 21

Chapter 3 Chicago: The Early Years 43

Chapter 4 Baraboo, Boalderstrewn, and Booze 55

Part 2 Wandering- The Scablands

Chapter 5 A Toe in the Water 77

Chapter 6 Diving In 103

Chapter 7 Parting the Waters 123

Chapter 8 A Deluge of Evidence 143

Chapter 9 Swimming Upstream 169

Chapter 10 To the Brink and Back Again 189

Part 3 The Trail To Absolution

Chapter 11 Putting the Scablands Behind Him 215

Chapter 12 Following a Path to the Sea 235

Chapter 13 The Scablands After Bretz 249

Notes 271

Bibliography 283

Photography and Illustration Credits 286

Acknowledgments 287

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