For comparison, this is between 4 and 5 times larger than the Osceola Mudflow ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola_Mudflow ) that formed the 550km² of fertile plains around the south end of Puget Sound (near Seattle) and knocked a huge chunk out of Mount Rainier. If you drive from Auburn to Enumclaw, for example, notice how flat the land is and think about how that was hilly Cascade foothills and glaciated drumlin…
> According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn't really happened throughout the Holocene). I don't know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we've had a real appreciation for how active Ear…
Re: A gigantic landslide shows the limit to how high mountains can grow
#41Geology went hard for uniformitarianism during the 19th century as a reaction against the earlier "catastrophist" worldview, which had interpreted all major land forms as consequences of the great global flood described in the Bible (or something like it). This yielded a strong preference for theories involving continuous processes operating over long spans of time, and skepticism of theories involving sudden, violent changes. This swung back to a better balance during the 20th century; with the ghost of Noah's Ark exorcised, the role of local "catastrophes" in geologic history could again be taken seriously.