Rowan E Majors Awash in Lessons from Biggest Flood Ever

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Some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago a body of water the size of Lake Michigan burst a natural ice dam and tore through Montana and Washington State.

"It was the largest flood ever," said Josh Wyrick, a Rowan assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who took a class of eight out West to study the effects of the floods last summer. "It's certainly unique and it gives students something to study they won't see in their own backyard."

The cataclysmic flooding, caused by a cycle of freezing and thawing toward the end of the last ice age, is believed to have occurred incrementally over dozens of years, discharging as much as 2.6 billion gallons of water per second at one point and ripping great chasms in the earth.

Wyrick said the amount of water discharged during the Missoula Floods - named for Glacial Lake Missoula, a body of water that built up from a melting ice sheet covering western Canada - is almost incomprehensible.

"About 500 cubic miles of water released suddenly," he said. "If you took all of the river flow on Earth it would only be about a 10th of this flood."

The rushing water transformed the landscape, washing aside trees and topsoil and creating vast rocky canyons. Landmarks include "Dry Falls," a parched site twice as wide as Niagara Falls and one and a half times as high.

Wyrick, who first studied the Missoula Floods as a graduate student, believes teaching students about the power of nature could help them mitigate natural and man-made flood damage as engineers.

"The reason this flood occurred was an ice dam broke," Wyrick said. "Well, what would happen if one of our man-made dams broke? The result would be similar if on a smaller scale."

He said many of the nation's mightiest dams, including the Hoover Dam between Arizona and Nevada and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, are aging structures built more than a half century ago that could, theoretically, give out.

Decreasing rainfall puts more pressure on authorities to capture water and that, in turn, stresses dams further, Wyrick said.

"In some cases dams have not had as much upkeep as they need so there is a potential for failure, especially if we put more demand on dams for greater water supply," he said.

Wyrick said it isn't clear if global warming will result in greater flooding but it might.

"The phrase ‘global warming' is sort of a misnomer," he said. "What it really means is we're experiencing more extremes - drier, hotter summers and colder, wetter winters. If we get more snow in winter, then, yes, you can have greater floods."

Ryan Headley, 21, a senior civil engineering major from Vineland, said travelling out west with Wyrick and seven other students enabled him to connect classroom studies with the physical world.

Headley, who may seek a career in water resource management, said the effects of global warming will take a lot of dedicated engineering to correct and he wants to play a part in the solution.

"Global warming is definitely an issue and it's a fast-growing problem," he said. "Although we may not feel the effects of global warming right now, we definitely will see a change in climate in the future and being proactive is the only way to slow these effects."

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