Geologist rewrites book on floods

By Ed Johnson

The West Linn Tidings, Nov 19, 2009

Portland State University professor Scott Burns recently released an updated version of a book about the Missoula flood originally published in 1986.

ED JOHNSON / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

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When you ask Scott Burns, a Tualatin resident and geology professor at Portland State University, how the subject of his newly released book would be of interest to non-geologists, he gets practically giddy with excitement.

“It’s everywhere in the Northwest,” Burns says. “Everywhere you drive in Portland, you drive from one Missoula flood creation to another. I think people are intrigued by the natural world around them, and how it came to be.”

“Cataclysms on the Columbia” was originally released in 1986, and was co-authored by PSU professors John Eliot Allen and Marjorie Burns (no relation). Scott got involved with a plan to update the book for a second edition about five years ago, but real work on the project has only happened over the last year or so, he says.

The book is divided into eight parts, starting out with a biography of J. Harlan Bretz, an early researcher who in 1919 proposed the idea that multiple cataclysmic floods from a great glacial lake were instrumental in forming the topography of the Pacific Northwest. Burns led a research team of his graduate students recently that determined the Willamette neighborhood of West Linn rests on a flood bar formed during the great floods.

“One of the things I think he does well is he’s able to write about geologic phenomena in a way the lay person can understand,” said Mark Buser, a West Linn resident and president of the Lower Columbia Chapter of the Ice Age Floods Institute, an organization that Burns also belongs to.

The Ice Age Floods interpretive trail in West Linn’s Fields Bridge Park, which includes a replica of the famous Willamette Meteorite, believed to have been deposited in the area by the Ice Age Floods, is also mentioned in the book.

“Every new resource that is made available on this phenomena is good,” Buser said.

He said it is especially relevant now that the United State Congress has approved funding for the Ice Age Flood National Geologic Trail, which could span across the western states in the path of the flood.

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