A geologist said a flood carved a landscape in days. Peers called it absurd for 40 years
In the 1920s, J Harlen Bretz argued that eastern Washington's scoured, canyon-cut 'Channeled Scablands' weren't shaped by slow erosion but by a single catastrophic flood. Fellow geologists mocked the idea for lacking any plausible water source big enough. In 1925, Joseph Pardee identified the source: an ice dam holding back a vast glacial lake had burst, and decades later, once the evidence was undeniable, Bretz's harshest critics sent him a telegram formally conceding he'd been right all along.