March 2018 Book Selection

In March the Natural History Society Book Club will discuss Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods by David Alt.  We will meet at the Pink House, next to the Port Townsend Carnegie Library, on Monday, March 26, from 3:30-5:00.

 

 

Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods tells the tale of a huge Ice Age lake that drained suddenly, and repeatedly. In the 1920s geologist J. Harlen Bretz came to the conclusion that the dry scablands of eastern Washington were sculpted by water.  The flood waters from the broken ice dam raced across western Montana, the Idaho panhandle, eastern Washington, down the Columbia River Gorge, out to the Pacific Ocean.

The book is also the story of geologists grappling with scientific controversy, in which personalities, pride, and prejudice conflict with scientific evidence.