J Harlen Bretz
Encyclopedia
J Harlen Bretz was an American geologist
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

, best known for his research that led to the acceptance of the Missoula Floods
Missoula Floods
The Missoula Floods refer to the cataclysmic floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge at the end of the last ice age. The glacial flood events have been researched since the 1920s...

, and also for his work on caves. He was born to Oliver Joseph Bretz and Rhoda Maria Howlett, farmers in Saranac, Michigan
Saranac, Michigan
Saranac is a village in Ionia County in the U.S. state of Michigan. As of the 2000 census, the village had a population of 1,326.Saranac is the birthplace of world-renowned geologist J...

, as the oldest of five children. He earned a degree in biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 from Albion College
Albion College
Albion College is a private liberal arts college located in Albion, Michigan. Related to the United Methodist Church, it was founded in 1835 and was the first private college in Michigan to have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. It has a student population of about 1500.The school's sports teams are...

, in 1906, where he also met his wife Fanny Chalis. Thereafter he became interested in the geology of Eastern Washington State.

Early career

Bretz graduated with his AB
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 from Albion College
Albion College
Albion College is a private liberal arts college located in Albion, Michigan. Related to the United Methodist Church, it was founded in 1835 and was the first private college in Michigan to have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. It has a student population of about 1500.The school's sports teams are...

 in 1905. He then started his career as a high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....

 biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 teacher
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...

 in Seattle. During this time he began studying the glacial
Glacier
A glacier is a large persistent body of ice that forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. At least 0.1 km² in area and 50 m thick, but often much larger, a glacier slowly deforms and flows due to stresses induced by its weight...

 geology of the Puget Sound
Puget Sound
Puget Sound is a sound in the U.S. state of Washington. It is a complex estuarine system of interconnected marine waterways and basins, with one major and one minor connection to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Ocean — Admiralty Inlet being the major connection and...

 area. He continued his studies at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 where he earned his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in geology in 1913. He became an assistant professor of geology, first at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 and then the University of Chicago.

He made important discoveries regarding the origin of the Channeled Scablands
Channeled scablands
The Channeled Scablands are a unique geological erosion feature in the U.S. state of Washington. They were created by the cataclysmic Missoula Floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. Geologist J Harlen Bretz coined...

.

Outrageous hypothesis

In the summer of 1922, and for the next seven years, Bretz conducted field research of the Columbia River Plateau
Columbia River Plateau
The Columbia Plateau is a geologic and geographic region that lies across parts of the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It is a wide flood basalt plateau between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains, cut through by the Columbia River...

. He had been interested in unusual erosion
Erosion
Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...

 features in the area since 1910 after seeing a newly published topographic map of the Potholes Cataract. Bretz coined the term Channeled Scablands
Channeled scablands
The Channeled Scablands are a unique geological erosion feature in the U.S. state of Washington. They were created by the cataclysmic Missoula Floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. Geologist J Harlen Bretz coined...

 in 1923 to describe the area near the Grand Coulee
Grand Coulee
The Grand Coulee is an ancient river bed in the U.S. state of Washington. This National Natural Landmark stretches for about sixty miles southwest from Grand Coulee Dam to Soap Lake, being bisected by Dry Falls into the Upper and Lower Grand Coulee....

, where massive erosion had cut through basalt
Basalt
Basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey...

 deposits. The area was a desert
Desert
A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than...

, but Bretz's theories required cataclysmic water flows to form the landscape, for which Bretz coined the term Spokane Floods in a 1925 publication.

Bretz published a paper in 1923, arguing that the channeled scablands
Channeled scablands
The Channeled Scablands are a unique geological erosion feature in the U.S. state of Washington. They were created by the cataclysmic Missoula Floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. Geologist J Harlen Bretz coined...

 in Eastern Washington
Eastern Washington
Eastern Washington is the portion of the U.S. state of Washington east of the Cascade Range. The region contains the city of Spokane , the Tri-Cities, the Columbia River and the Grand Coulee Dam, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the fertile farmlands of the Yakima Valley and the...

 were caused by massive flooding in the distant past. This view, which was seen as arguing for a Catastrophic
Catastrophism
Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...

 explanation of the geology, was against the prevailing view of uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism (science)
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...

, and Bretz's views were initially discredited. However, as the nature of the Ice Age
Ice age
An ice age or, more precisely, glacial age, is a generic geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers...

 was better understood, Bretz's original research was vindicated, and by the 1950s his insights were also vindicated.

Bretz encountered resistance to his theories from the geology establishment. The geology establishment was resistant to such a sweeping theory for the origin of a broad landscape for a variety of reasons, including lack of familiarity with the remote areas of the interior Pacific Northwest where the research was based, and the lack of status and reputation of Bretz in the eyes of the largely Ivy League-based geology establishment. The Geological Society of Washington, D.C
Geological Society of America
The Geological Society of America is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the geosciences. The society was founded in New York in 1888 by Alexander Winchell, John J. Stevenson, Charles H. Hitchcock, John R. Proctor and Edward Orton and has been headquartered at 3300 Penrose...

 invited the young Bretz to present his previously published research at a January 12, 1927 meeting where several other geologists presented competing theories. Bretz saw this as an ambush, and referred to the group as six challenging elders. Their intention was to defeat him in a public debate, and thus end the challenge his theories posed to the long standing uniformitarianism dogma.

Another geologist at the meeting, J.T. Pardee
Joseph Pardee
Joseph T. Pardee was a U.S. geologist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, and contributed to the understanding of the origin of the Channeled scablands. He discovered the trail of evidence left by Glacial Lake Missoula, a lake created by an ice dam 23 miles wide and half a mile high during...

, had worked with Bretz and had evidence of an ancient glacial lake
Proglacial lake
In geology, a proglacial lake is a lake formed either by the damming action of a moraine or ice dam during the retreat of a melting glacier, or by meltwater trapped against an ice sheet due to isostatic depression of the crust around the ice...

 that lent credence to Bretz's theories. Pardee, however lacked the academic freedom of Bretz (he worked for the US Geological Survey) and did not enter the fray.

Bretz defended his theories and this kicked off an acrimonious forty year debate over the origin of the Scablands. Both Pardee and Bretz continued their research over the next 30 years, collecting and analyzing evidence that eventually identified Lake Missoula as the source of the Spokane Floods
Missoula Floods
The Missoula Floods refer to the cataclysmic floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge at the end of the last ice age. The glacial flood events have been researched since the 1920s...

 and creator of the Channeled Scablands. Research on open channel hydraulics in the 1970s further vindicated Bretz's and Pardee's theories.

Caves and Karst

Bretz wrote an extremely influential paper on the morphology and origin of limestone
Limestone
Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate . Many limestones are composed from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera....

 caves (1942) together with detailed studies of the caves of Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...

 (1956) and Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

 (with Stanley Harris, 1961).

Awards and honours

The National Speleological Society made Bretz an honorary member in 1954.

Bretz received the Penrose Medal
Penrose Medal
The Penrose Medal was created in 1927 by R.A.F. Penrose, Jr. as the top prize awarded by the Geological Society of America to those who advance the study of geoscience.-Award winners:* 2011 Paul F. Hoffman* 2010 Eric J. Essene* 2009 B. Clark Burchfiel...

; the Geological Society of America
Geological Society of America
The Geological Society of America is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the geosciences. The society was founded in New York in 1888 by Alexander Winchell, John J. Stevenson, Charles H. Hitchcock, John R. Proctor and Edward Orton and has been headquartered at 3300 Penrose...

's highest award, in 1979, at the age of 96. After this award, he told his son: "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."

Each year at Albion College
Albion College
Albion College is a private liberal arts college located in Albion, Michigan. Related to the United Methodist Church, it was founded in 1835 and was the first private college in Michigan to have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. It has a student population of about 1500.The school's sports teams are...

, the J Harlen Bretz Award is given to the most outstanding senior in the geology department.

External links

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