Friday, April 7, 2017

The English Channel and Eastern Washington

A few news outlets have had fun with a new geology paper and Brexit. Gupta and others (2017) used high resolution sonar imagery as well as seismic line investigations to support a theory about the formation of the Dover Strait and the formation of Great Britain as an island. Hence, the term Brexit being applied by news stories about the paper. The resemblance to eastern Washington landscapes of the sonar imagery is striking.

From Gupta and others (2017)

Smith (1985) proposed that the Strait of Dover was carved by a large glacial age flood event. That idea has gained strong support (see for example Gibbard (2007) and Gupta and others (2007)).

Gupta and others (2017) further support the idea of a huge ice-age flood using far higher resolution data than what was available to Smith (1985), and their recent work helps refine the idea. They noted similarities between the topography in the Dover Strait and the landscape of eastern Washington's Channeled Scabland, "We interpret the amphitheater-shaped channel heads as abandoned cataracts formed by focussed knickpoint popagation similar to those formed by high-magnitude floods in the Channeled Scabland, Snake River Plains and Iceland".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. It'll take me a while to understand all that's in that article but I loves me a good breakthrough--especially when it is literal...Keep up the good work.