Finding home: Enchanting places, disagreeable names
Badlands. Scablands.
We can’t seem to get away from ugly names for places of surpassing beauty.
We traveled halfway across the country looking for new adventures, determined to immerse ourselves in our new place — its history, culture, geography and geology. But we found, on the geography/geology front, that there are some surprising similarities, at least on the thin top layers of cause and effect. Arriving in the Tri-Cities, we immediately came across the term scablands and, looking at a few photos, were struck by similarities to formations known up and down the Great Plains as badlands.
Like the scablands, most of the badlands trace at least part of their history to ancient volcanic activity. And on the northern plains, badlands areas also were influenced by the advance and retreat of the great Ice Age glaciers.
The Ice Edge
One of our favorite signs in the northern North Dakota badlands says: Edge of Glacier. It’s posted in the middle of a vast grassland that continues north to the horizon. No glacier to be seen. Turn around, however, and you’re confronted with the yawning, multicolored, fantastical landscape of the badlands, preserved today as part of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The ice sheet diverted the course of the Little Missouri River here — where once it flowed north into Hudson Bay, now it flows east into the Missouri and ultimately the Mississippi.
Beyond origins in volcanic fire and glacial ice, however, all similarities end. One up-close look at the scablands — for example, in the Drumheller Channels northwest of Othello, makes that abundantly clear.
Many millions of years ago, the Great Plains constituted the slowly dropping floor of a shallow inland sea. Deposits eroded from the mountains filled the sea bottom even as it subsided, eventually piling up 5,000 to 10,000 feet of layered sediments. That’s not what we see today, however, because about 70 million years ago, the nation’s midsection rose above sea level. Since then, stream and wind covered the plains with deposits from eroding western mountains, along with recurrent blanketing by volcanic ash.
A Bedrock of Basalt
The Columbia Basin, by contrast, was inundated by thousands of feet of lava, which hardened into the basalt that underlies and forms the bones of this entire region.
On the plains, the glaciers melted at a leisurely pace, and rivers wound their way east from the Rockies, slowly eroding through the horizontal layers of deposited silt, clay, sand, gravel and ash. Across much of the plains, streams describe gentle courses featuring rolling, shallow-sloped sides. These have their own subtle beauty. But there’s no mistaking badlands when you encounter them.
Where circumstances conspired to create a steeper slope, more rapid erosion carved sharp, jagged formations that vary as waters cut through alternately thinner and thicker, softer and more resistant, layers. Different mineral and other composition results in a cacophony of color. The steep slopes and erosional jumble made them difficult to cross on foot or with horse-drawn wagons. Bad lands to traverse. Hence the name.
We’re not sure how J. Harlan Bretz came up with the term “scabland.” He’s the geologist who unraveled the clues to the mid-Columbia geologic puzzle.
The Power of Water
Turns out there’s a reason for the superficial similarities between scablands and badlands. The scablands, too, were carved out by flowing water. Except that, rather than slow erosion over thousands or even millions of years, a series of brief, cataclysmic floods quickly eroded the hard, fractured basalt.
We imagine that most folks have heard of the Great Plains’ badlands, but we were completely, though most pleasantly, surprised by the scablands, and by the unusual local geology in general. Whether over moments or millennia, the erosive power of water creates sensational, endlessly varied landforms that are a joy to discover and a pleasure to behold.
The Payoff
Then we found out that all this volcanic activity and wind erosion and enormous floods resulted in a countryside ideally suited for growing cherries and peaches and asparagus and blueberries and apples and … wine grapes. That sealed the deal. Especially that last part. Now we know we’ve come to the right place.
Randy Bradbury recently moved to the Tri-Cities from Wichita, Kan., with his partner, Denice Bruce. Bruce works in communications for the Environmental and Molecular Science Lab at PNNL. Bradbury is communication manager for the Washington Department of Ecology Hanford Nuclear Waste Program. This is another in an occasional series.
This story was originally published August 4, 2016 at 5:47 AM with the headline "Finding home: Enchanting places, disagreeable names."