On my (not so) recent trip down the Grand Canyon, I had a lingering memory of Cassie suggesting that Keith Howard had been a little hard to convince as to the reality of lava dam failure and catastrophic flooding there, but that some of the field evidence finally convinced him. I had that lingering memory because I was weakly skeptical based on the lack of such evidence on the Owyhee, but was confused because I had read (and reviewed) a couple of her papers. Turned out that I really needed to see the stuff in person with a better backlog of personal observations. As I noted in a previous post, some of the flood evidence was (to me) hilariously clear and my skepticism was baseless for the most part.

Now that I have finally read Keith's Boise River lava dam paper, I can understand why he was skeptical given the striking parallels between the Boise River story and the Owyhee River story. (thanks to Lisa for sending the pdf). Moreover, the Howard and Fenton abstract (that, admittedly, I was not aware of) reads just like the thoughts I had in mind while thinking of the Owyhee while floating the Colorado. Some of the differences are profound.

Admission of guilt: I am truly embarrassed that I had not read the Howard et al. paper years ago, as it would have made it far easier and faster for me to understand the history of the Owyhee River. Oh well....As for the more recent abstract...no excuses there either.

We should really consider checking out the Boise River sites sometime.

LAVA DAMS COMPARED IN BOISE RIVER CANYON AND GRAND CANYON

HOWARD, Keith A., U.S. Geol Survey, Menlo Park, CA 94025, khoward@usgs.gov and FENTON, Cassandra R., U.S. Geol Survey, 1675 W. Anklam Rd, Tucson, AZ 85745
Pleistocene intracanyon basalt flows that dammed the Boise River, Idaho offer comparisons to those that dammed the more powerful Colorado River in Grand Canyon. In both canyons, olivine basalts erupted several times from vents near canyon rims, and flowed down steep canyon walls into the rivers and onto thick gravel beds. The multiple lava dams in Grand Canyon exhibit many stratigraphic complexities as compared to the simpler stratigraphic structure of the dams built on the Boise River, best exemplified by the Steamboat Rock Basalt and the Smith Prairie Basalt on the Boise River’s south fork. These two dams were each constructed to heights of 150 m from multiple flow units of basalt, which flowed tens of kilometers downstream while building lava deltas into the growing reservoirs on the dam’s upstream faces. Paleowater levels in the lava deltas, where lava flowed into rising reservoir waters behind the dams on the Boise River, are easily recognized as passage zones where topsets of subaerial pahoehoe pass abruptly downward into upstream-dipping foresets of pillows and hyaloclastite. Successive flow units entering a rising reservoir resulted in an asymmetric dam, much longer on the downstream face, and cored by massive subaerial basalt that interfingered upstream with a series of upstream-thickening wedges of pillow basalt. Grand Canyon lava dams also show evidence of upstream deltas where lava interacted with dammed water (described by Hamblin), but coarse hydroclastitc breccia dominates over pillows and foreset-bedded hyaloclastite; the deltaic structures are complex. Whereas several dams in the Grand Canyon failed catastrophically to produce outburst floods (described by Fenton and colleagues), the dams on the Boise River were incised gradually. Their long downstream lengths contributed stability. The long flows and abundant pillows relative to breccias suggest fluidity of the lavas, and suggest rates of eruption and lava flow that were high relative to the discharge of the river that they entered. The Colorado’s discharge is twenty times that of the Boise River South Fork.

Rocky Mountain (56th Annual) and Cordilleran (100th Annual) Joint Meeting (May 3–5, 2004)

Funny aside: at the meeting in Bend, I 'independently' developed a diagram for how we could graphically convey the last 1.8 my of the persistently interrupted incision history of the Owyhee. Much to my dismay, within minutes of touting the merits of my exmple figure, I was faced with a nearly exact example prepared by Howard et al. Lisa had the paper with her and I read it for the first time right then and there. In addition to the figure, many of the concepts presented in the paper were identical to discussions that we always have and were having that day. We then became concerned about how we could distinguish our study from theirs beyond just stating that it also happened somewhere else not very far away. I keep verging toward a discussion of the differences between landslide dams and lava dams with interesting counterpoints from the Colorado River and the Rio Grande.