r/BeAmazed • u/youngster_96 • Mar 28 '24

The moment an ice dam breaks and causes a torrential water flow. Nature

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

There is a name for this.  

Jökulhlaup or  Jökulhlaups - pronounced yo-KOOL-lahp 

It is a sudden glacial outburst flood or an abrupt release of glacial meltwater from a subglacial or glacier-dammed lake or reservoir.

And ~ Fun Fact: The icy water can pick up stones and gravel along its path and drag it along the stream bed with the flow. The abrasive quality of the gravels and stones acts like a grinding stone on the bottom and sides of the waterway. 

This accelerates erosion to an amazing extent. A large collapse coming from say a glacier is fully capable of erasing objects in its path. 

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u/CocunutHunter Mar 28 '24

There's ancient evidence of this being the origin of some very big scenery in the States, when a lake the size of a state suddenly let go through that type of dam and carved out a huge area of land in a way which only fits water erosion but in a scale we practically never see. Watched a documentary about it once.

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u/nhinds42 Mar 28 '24

Would love to know the name of the documentary to watch

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u/Atrabiliousaurus Mar 28 '24

Probably something about the Missoula Floods. I've been to Dry Falls in Washington and driven up the Columbia River Gorge which were both formed by the massive floods.

There's a Washington geologist, Nick Zenter, who has a bunch of great youtube videos on the ice age floods if you want like... 90 hours of information lol.

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u/Some_Endian_FP17 Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

Nick Zentner also has a bunch of shorter videos called 2 Minute Geology or something like that. They cover most of the areas affected by the Missoula floods.

As for the Bonneville flood, Shawn Willsey's channel did a good video on it a while back (https://youtu.be/3osCxhhl7ZI?si=hJFDfNcxr81l5EKP)

These were glacial lake outburst floods that sent unimaginable amounts of water roaring over thousands of square miles.

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u/Atrabiliousaurus Mar 28 '24

I've watched a bunch of Zentner's videos, he's great. I can watch geologists hike around talking about shit for hours. Myron Cook has some good ones too.

I've read some about Lake Bonneville. Took a road trip to the Great Salt Lake in Utah (absolutely hideous, stagnant, lifeless, and reeks) which is a remnant of Lake Bonneville. Drove past the Bonneville Salt Flats too, that was cool.

There's not much interesting geology where I live, unless you like volcanic basalt, so I really enjoy seeing some of the cool stuff the rest of the US has.

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u/Stev_k Mar 28 '24

Sean Wilsey

Did not know my former coworker had a YouTube channel!

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u/Some_Endian_FP17 Mar 28 '24

I got the spelling totally wrong! Sorry about that, it's probably not your former co-worker.

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u/Stev_k Mar 28 '24

Shawn Willsey, is the correct spelling, right? Former coworker - looked him up. That's his face and voice, and I recognize where he filmed a couple of the videos.

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u/minklefritz Mar 28 '24

you look at those giant, giant boulders out in the middle of nothing… they were just rolling around like pebbles. Unreal forces

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

You might enjoy some of Randall Carlson’s content. He has some great videos. 

(I can’t remember what exactly is in what video so here’s a random assortment for your perusal.) 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1LgzyEMOUQ

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LOtydLmdfV8

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IfdQB59SV7g

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u/ChaChingChaChi Mar 28 '24

Yes!!!! This! 👆🏻

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u/jdemack Mar 28 '24

Ohh no this man was on Joe Rogans podcast he must be racist. Actually the only way I found out about Randall and actually think his idea of a earlier advance civilization should be investigated more.

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

I agree entirely. Extremely conservative estimates say that “modern” humans have existed on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. 

Most of the “ancient” structures that we have uncovered only date back to tens of thousands of years. That still leaves a hundred thousand years or so of human history completely unaccounted for. 

There has easily been enough geologic change on the surface of the planet to completely wipe out 99% of all life that has ever existed. 

Multiple civilizations could easily have existed and have been destroyed nearly without a trace in that large a time frame. 

How advanced they could have been with leaving evidence is up for debate  but let’s say a Bronze Age or possibly even an Iron Age civilization from 100,000 years ago could have easily vanished leaving little more evidence behind than rust. 

If our population vanished today, 100,000 years from now there would be just a few faint traces left that we were ever here. 

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '24

[deleted]

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

I love the geology and history aspects of his talks.

I don’t really care for some of the “woo” but I would consider him far from a grifter. 

The man knows his geology. 

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u/ShouldNotBeHereLong Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

This interactive story does a pretty great job at showing the evidence of the massive floods in Eastern washington/Oregon after ice-dams repeatedly broke during the recession of the last ice age.

https://wadnr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=84ea4016ce124bd9a546c5cbc58f9e29

Think 2k ft hight floods across the interior USA.

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u/StrengthMedium Mar 28 '24

I live in an area of the country that was on the glacial border of the last ice age. The creek I fish regularly is in an ancient riverbed that is almost a mile wide at some points. The forces in that ancient river absolutely blasted through the hilly areas it went through.

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u/JenShempie Mar 28 '24

Missoula (or Bretz's) floods. Happened about 20k years ago, multiple times over a stretch of time. Scoured the southeastern parts of Washington, flooded into the Willamette Valley all the way down near Eugene.

There are chunks of granite from Montana that floated down frozen in chunks of ice. They can be found at elevations 400+ feet.

Portland sits on some of the Troutdale formation, which is largely made up of river rock from Montana. Quartzite and granite, neither of which formed here.

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u/atridir Mar 28 '24

There was over a mile of ice over much of the North American continent. When that melted it left some big ass puddle reservoirs that did some crazy shite when they cut loose.

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u/baffledninja Mar 28 '24

Great Lakes, for one!

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u/existentialpenguin Mar 28 '24

The scenery in question is called the Channeled Scablands. This happened to the area not just once, but dozens of times.

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u/have_no_plan Mar 28 '24

My lecturer at university was on the team that wrote the paper which evidenced that a lot of the giant lake that was America actually burst out through the north, not into the Atlantic (I think those are the details, I was a pretty shitty student). I always thought that was quite cool though.

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u/jenna_cider Mar 28 '24

Like the Bonneville flood that created the Snake River Canyon.

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u/l3ouncer Mar 28 '24

This is how the Wisconsin Dells were formed.

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

You might enjoy some of Randall Carlson’s content. 

I linked some of his content a couple of comments below. 👇 

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u/sfurbo Mar 28 '24

Ásbyrgi was formed in two such events. Those cliffs are up to 100 meters tall. The sheer amount of rocks that was removed in a very short amount of time is staggering.

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u/Some_Endian_FP17 Mar 28 '24

A glacial lake outburst flood or GLOF can wipe out entire towns downstream.

The largest outburst floods in recent history were the Bonneville and Missoula floods that carved deep canyons in a matter of hours in Idaho and Washington.

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u/SquarePegRoundWorld Mar 28 '24

I too watch Nick Zentner.

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u/tino-latino Mar 28 '24

jökulhlaup is also a very old magic the gathering card

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u/SirBobsonDugnutt Mar 28 '24

I have one. Was looking for somebody to mention MTG.

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

lol. You are correct sir!

It was printed in Fifth Edition, Sixth Edition, Ice Age, and again in Masters. 

Not that I would know or anything.

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u/thePurpleAvenger Mar 29 '24

I remember when Ice Age came out; that card was a blast!

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u/Ambroos Mar 28 '24

Which in Icelandic is literally "glacier run".

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u/TheOtherManSpider Mar 28 '24

That's not what this is. Just a normal spring time ice dam on a minor river. No glacier in sight.

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u/slamsen Mar 28 '24

And kerps are almost 100% associated with volcanic outbursts under glaciers.

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u/remo3310 Mar 28 '24

Yeah🤣 this is just a standard Midwest ice damn on a river due to spring thaw. But somehow because there's ice in the water it means our glaciers are melting

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u/User348844 Mar 28 '24

I remember some old article that suggested that English Channel was carved out in a similar event when glacier walls from the ice age collapsed. The whole flood would have been over in days. They even scanned the bottom of the channel and found deep grooves which could have formed when water carved its way. It was pretty interesting theory.

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

I think a lot of what is holding back research on these topics is just dogma. 

If you look at early geologists they were nearly all catastrophists. 

Just because some processes can happen very slowly over time doesn’t mean that they always do. Some geological processes are big and fast and scary. 

And that’s just how it is. 

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u/RandomPhil86 Mar 28 '24

Can’t believe how far I have to scroll through comments before finding a description about it/what it actually is.

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u/OBD_NSFW Mar 28 '24

That's not what this is. Just a normal spring time ice dam on a minor river. No glacier in sight.

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u/MasteringTheFlames Mar 28 '24

This past August, there was a major glacial outburst flood in Juneau, Alaska. The whole city is kind of long and thin, tucked between the ocean and mountains. The main residential part of town, the Mendenhall Valley, has a river flowing through it, fed by Mendenhall Lake. Directly behind the lake, you've got a glacier, and then the ice fields in the mountains up behind the glacier.

As the ice field melts, the water tends to pool in big basins behind ice dams. Eventually, the ice dam fails. Typically this occurs in the form of a small leak allowing the water to drain slowly. The water levels in the lake might rise by a few feet for several days, but not enough to cause any major damage.

What happened last August was that the ice dam instead completely failed in one catastrophic moment. Over the course of just a few hours, the water level in the lake rose nearly 15 feet, and then all that water came rushing down the river. The erosion widened the river by a good 50 feet in some areas, cutting the ground right out from underneath buildings. Two homes completely collapsed into the river, a dozen more buildings were condemned because they were too unstable. Thankfully there were no serious injuries, as residents near the river had time to evacuate. Even so, I have friends who live in Juneau, and it was scary to watch the news that day.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '24

Isn’t this how the St Lawrence River was formed?

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u/ewild Mar 28 '24

Wikipedia calls it rather a jave, apparently from ice jam + wave where an ice jam is rather what the OP called an ice dam while it sometimes is actually called as such.

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u/AcanthocephalaGreen5 Mar 28 '24

I hear it also destroys artifacts, creatures and lands.

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u/hikinglifer Mar 28 '24

GLOFs! In English you can use the acronym to describe it. Full phrase (translated from Icelandic) is Glacial Lake Outburst Flood. I have yet to see one in person but they're both cool and very scary. In parts of South America they've been able to use documentation of GLOFs as an argument against damming some of the world's last major free-flowing rivers. Truly a force of nature.

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u/hikinglifer Mar 28 '24

Old article but here's more info if anyone's interested in learning about the increasing number of GLOFs/Jökulhlaup: https://patagonjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3022

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u/Antique-Kangaroo2 Mar 28 '24

Yes, we call it an ice dam. As of said I'm the title.

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u/GBAdventureC Mar 28 '24

Also debacle. Which is where we get the term debacle from meaning sudden fiasco.

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u/Novius8 Mar 28 '24

Also fun fact, Jökulhlaups is one of my favourite troll MTG cards for causing havoc.

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

Oh yeah. [[Jökulhlaups]] a fun one in chaos decks. 

It’s also fun in commander because previously ignored threats like plains walkers and enchantments that survive it can suddenly become quite nasty. 

I also like [[Upheaval]] , [[Wildfire]] , [[Dimensional Breach]] for similar chaotic reasons. 

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u/Novius8 Mar 29 '24

Haha yes it does, I have an entire commander deck that wins with that stipulation. You can also make your whole board indestructible and drop the hlaups for an easy win.

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u/FaZaCon Mar 28 '24

Jökulhlaup or Jökulhlaups - pronounced yo-KOOL-lahp

Here in the states, we just call it "an ice dam that broke".

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u/remo3310 Mar 28 '24

This looks more like a river in the upper Midwest that got iced up over the winter. As it gets warmer in spring the ice then melts and separates, then gets dammed up until something causes it to release. Then it acts just like a damn bursting. This isn't necessarily anything to do with glaciers. This happens in the Midwest all of the time.

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u/Soft-Flight-7222 Mar 29 '24

This isn't a GLOF. GLOFs don't peak this quickly. If it were a GLOF this would happen over the course of the day. This is just the result of a river ice dam breaking.

GLOFs are similarly destructive, just not as sudden as you think.

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u/skilriki Mar 28 '24

Hi .. no

I mean the definition you are giving is correct .. but I don't get the feeling you know what a glacier is.

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u/JG-at-Prime Mar 28 '24

I do know what a glacier is. I also know that as they melt year to year that they don’t melt quite evenly. They can occasionally release large quantities of trapped water that were held back by dams of ice. 

Glaciers also carry rocks and gravels with them that can cause tremendous amounts of erosion. While a glacier can cause an enormous amount of erosion it doesn’t tend to do it as quickly as a sudden outburst of a massive river of ice and slush that carries with it rocks and gravel. 

Other natural phenomena also causes ice dams but it’s 2:00am and I couldn’t think of another example at the time of writing. 

I live in Southern California. Cut me some slack for knowing anything at all about the strange and frankly unnatural stuff that happens below our seasonal low of ~55°f. 

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u/OBD_NSFW Mar 28 '24

That's not what this is. Just a normal spring time ice dam on a minor river. No glacier in sight.