I Found Evidence of the Apocalypse in the West

This is the largest waterfall on Earth.

Around 13,000 years ago, more water poured over the top of this cliff than in every single river in the world today combined. Times 10.

combined. Times 10.

It was so powerful that it completely destroyed the landscape of eastern Washington and left behind a scarred wasteland that is now visible from

space. While researching this area, I

space. While researching this area, I started to realize that this might be where one of the most terrifying events in human history occurred. And I can't believe I had never heard the story told

in its entirety before. But we'll get to that in a second. First, you must understand that when the flood ripped apart the surface of the earth, it revealed strange things that were hidden

deep underground for millions of years, such as a cave hidden somewhere in the cliffs with a truly bizarre shape and

history. I knew I had to find it.

history. I knew I had to find it.

The cave is somewhere up there and we have to traverse along these cliffs to get over there. This area is called the channel scablands because it's literally been scarred and torn apart and also

there's not a lot of trees and vegetation that grow out here because all of the top soil was stripped away by these flooding events. As far as we can see, there's almost no trees. The cave

that we're going to has an origin millions of years in the past.

It is important to remember that what we are looking at here is less than 20,000 years old.

In terms of the geological time span, it was practically a couple minutes ago.

For a comparison, it's estimated that the Grand Canyon took up to 70 million years to be created. Nowhere else on Earth is there a landscape that has

changed so drastically so recently.

We have proof that humans lived in North America for the last 20,000 years at minimum.

The fact that we live so close in time to what might have been one of the largest flooding events in the Earth's history is truly bizarre.

This is awesome. It's very strange to be in what feels like a really hot, dry desert and then just to have a huge lake right underneath this cliff.

Check out the pummus. Pummus has an insane surface area. If you took into consideration all the pockets and holes in the surface area of them, it's probably equivalent to multiple tennis

courts of a surface area just contained within this one little rock. And it's

good for exfoliating.

All right, I think I can see it.

It's the tiniest little hole right there on the cliff.

Really steep.

Really loose climb up here. It's just

starting to get hot, too.

You could just imagine the incredible amounts of water it took pouring through the center of this valley to carve it out.

All right, we made it. We're right

underneath it.

[Applause] Check it out.

So, that's the opening of the cave right there.

We still got to climb up some sketchy stuff to get there. So,

all of this rock that we're standing under, it's all pillow basalt. And

that's usually formed when lava falls into water and cools very quickly. So,

that's going to be very important to keep in mind when you understand how this cave came to be created.

So All right, we are now inside the cave and we are currently sitting

inside what was once a rhino. The inside

of this cave is the fossilized opening that was left behind when a rhino was enveloped in lava 15 million

years ago. So its head and its horn is

years ago. So its head and its horn is back here. So that's the space where its

back here. So that's the space where its horn was. And we take it back a bit.

horn was. And we take it back a bit.

We can see this is the outline of its head and its neck. And then right here are its leg holes.

Kind of looks like it had short stumpy legs.

So there's its back right leg and there's its front right leg, front left leg. And then its head and its horn is at the end.

And then the gap is sort of where his butt would have been. The rock has a really unique appearance in here. So it

was first discovered by two guys hunting for rocks and minerals up these cliffs and in the bottom of the cave they found these bone fragments and they got them analyzed and they discovered that they

were ancient rhinoceros bones. They

decided to come back and and actually get a geologist to investigate what they had found. And the geologist climbed in

had found. And the geologist climbed in here and noticed that the cave is strangely rhinoshaped. I mean, it

strangely rhinoshaped. I mean, it literally looks like a rhino. You could

see I'm in like a big barrel chest right now. And how this all probably occurred

now. And how this all probably occurred is there's a massive eruption event 15 million years ago. And this rhino was on

his back either floating or falling into water when the lava came and enveloped it. And because the lava fell into a

it. And because the lava fell into a body of water, it didn't completely burn away the outline of the rhino. Instead,

the pillow basalt formed around the shape and it was preserved in the ground for 15 million years.

I almost feel like I can make out the the wrinkly skin of a rhino.

So, it's not that big of a rhinoceros. I

feel like the ones that we see nowadays are much larger.

So, then there's another hole right here.

And this one could be the remnants of a log. There's actually a lot of log

log. There's actually a lot of log shaped outlines that were also found in this cliff face because there's probably logs and this rhino floating in the body

of water when it was all enveloped by the lava during the eruption.

All right, I got to climb down. I think

I can say with confidence that I've never sat inside a 15 million-year-old rhino before, but now I have. And that was, you know, really high on my bucket list. If not

for the massive flooding events here, we never would have seen this rhino-shaped cave. It never would have eroded onto

cave. It never would have eroded onto the surface. And that really makes you

the surface. And that really makes you wonder, you know, how many other rhinoshaped caves or every animal shaped cave are there

lying underneath the ground here in all this baltt?

Probably a lot.

[Music] About 70 mi away, yet still within the path of the flood,

exists more strange shapes that are only possible to be seen in the aftermath.

That is where the road took me next.

It's interesting. I was hiking out here and listening to some music and then the song Over the Hills and Far Away comes on, which is a great song. And then I look at the album art and I realized it

appears like there's columnar basalt in the album art by Led Zeppelin. And I'm

literally going out to find some of that. That was kind of a cool

that. That was kind of a cool synchronicity.

[Music] >> Look at that shape.

Looks like a sculpture.

[Music] Wow.

Columnar basalt is something that humans should rarely get a chance to see. It

can only be created during the slowest cooling processes of lava after an eruption in the deepest parts of the flow.

The slower the cooling of the lava, the more hexagonal the shape becomes, which is why the top layer here and the lava surrounding the rhino has no geometry.

The reason these basalt columns are visible is because they were exposed to the surface from the depths of the earth by the churning of the flood water.

While some remained standing as normal, other columns were plucked from the ground, tumbled downstream, and restacked at odd angles or sideways like

a pile of matchsticks.

Look at how wild this landscape is and you can just see how the the earth has just been scoured and these big ripples are running across it. So, it's

really cool to look at those on Google Earth. As technology allows us to get a

Earth. As technology allows us to get a bigger view of the Earth, the evidence of a flood is harder to ignore. The

revelation of the shocking history of the channel Scablands came very recently. It was first controversially

recently. It was first controversially proposed by the geologist Jay Harland Brett in the 1920s who was widely ridiculed for his claims. But then

starting in the 1940s, geologist Joseph Hardy used aerial photography to expose giant ripples in the ground that could

only have been created from a massive water flow. In the 1970s, the advent of

water flow. In the 1970s, the advent of widescale satellite imagery revealed the full scale of the scablands and made

Brett's hypothesis undeniable.

Potholes created by the drilling, swirling motion of the water exist on magnitudes greater here than anywhere else on Earth.

These are potholes I have found on my travels outside of the channel Scablands. These are quite sizable and

Scablands. These are quite sizable and impressive on their own.

Yet, the ones scattered across the channel scablands can be hundreds of times larger and are located on what are now flat, dry measure even close to

flowing water.

So, you can actually see these places where there's these huge circular indentations in the ground by gigantic rocks spinning around and drilling into

the earth.

Except that these are on a scale, I mean, magnitudes larger than anything you'll ever find in a stream bed.

Just outside of the Scablands at Cooper's Ferry along the Salmon River, archaeologists have discovered stone tools dating back to at least 16,000 years. That shows that people were

years. That shows that people were living in the Columbia River drainage at a similar time to when the floods began.

Back then, it's likely that Eastern Washington closely resembled the beautiful spaces seen in central Montana today.

A place that would be rich in game and resources and highly desirable for the archaic nomadic tribes of the northern

plains.

[Music] Around 15,000 years ago, as the North American ice sheet retreated, its

southern edge near present day Missoula, Montana damned the Clark Fork River, which swelled and formed a massive glacial lake. At its peak, this lake

glacial lake. At its peak, this lake held nearly 500 cubic miles of water, the equivalent of five Mount Reeneers made of liquid straining behind a

fragile wall of ice. When the dam failed, a colossal amount of water would have been sent pouring down into the lowlands of eastern Washington.

The very nature of the cataclysm means we will never be able to find direct proof that people were in the path of this flood, but it is highly likely.

They would have witnessed something beyond a tsunami and far worse. The

front of the surge would be an unfathomable wall of white water, icebergs, and houses-sized chunks of earth that would reach a height of hundreds of feet tall and would travel

from 60 to 80 m hour. Which means that in certain places with large views looking east, they probably would have plenty of time to watch it coming. But

unless you lived directly next to the foothills of the Cascade Ranges, escape would be impossible. The earth would have shook and the sound would have been deafening.

Every single person, every tree, and every single animal would have been pulverized and swept through the Columbia River basin and out into the Pacific Ocean. Further downstream, the

Pacific Ocean. Further downstream, the initial surges would likely fill the river channel first, and they would have had more time to run.

It would have been a literal apocalypse.

So, this is a first. I spotted what we were trying to find. It's this

incredible petetroglyph panel on sort of a monolith of rock on the other side of this valley. But the landscape between

this valley. But the landscape between here and there is so convoluted and so maze-like that I honestly don't know if I'd have enough time to figure it out before the

sun goes down. I really underestimated just how intricate this landscape is.

The petetroglyphs in this area are really incredible. They have a certain

really incredible. They have a certain geometric style to them uh here as well as along the entire Columbia River

basin. You know, they lived amongst and

basin. You know, they lived amongst and nearby this columnar basalt.

And that made me wonder if perhaps that had something to do with influencing their art style.

Geologists assert that once every few decades, perhaps once a lifetime, the ice dam rebuilt and failed again in a cycle that only stopped around 12,000

years ago when the ice sheet finally withdrew into Canada. Which makes you wonder how long it would take for Native Americans and animals to dare venture

back in, or if they would constantly, and if every flood was a new catastrophe all over again.

Many native peoples of the Columbia Plateau have oral traditions relating to a flood such as the Salish and Coutini of Montana who tell stories of when people had to flee to the mountain tops.

The Nespers and Yaka along with the Spokane who have oral traditions relating to a time when the world was covered in water and people would survive only on high ground and

repopulate the valleys when the water receded. the Chinukan people of the

receded. the Chinukan people of the Lower Colombia who spoke of cycles when the land was washed over and over again along with countless other Native American oral traditions from across the

Americas. These are strangely

Americas. These are strangely reminiscent of stories told from across the world from ancient times like those in the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Greek mythology.

So what happened after the flood?

Humans gradually started making their way back into the scab lands where the erosional features formed from the floods that might have terrorized their ancestors

became an important part of their life.

People started making their homes in the potholes and caves undercut by the waterfalls.

And slowly the memory of the flood faded except in the oral traditions passed on across generations only to be confirmed later by the

progression of modern technology and satellite imagery.

We're standing on the edge of a colossal pothole and the flooding undercut these cliffs and hollowed out these caves. And these caves were

these caves. And these caves were inhabited by Native Americans as far back as estimated to be 5,000 years ago, could have been a lot older,

and were inhabited up until as recent as the 19th century. Every aspect of this landscape has been affected by the

colossal glacier floods.

And it is just so incredible that humans used this floodscape as their home and they lived inside of these absolutely spectacular geological features. This is

undoubtedly one of the strangest and most interesting landscapes in the entire world. And it's been pretty

entire world. And it's been pretty incredible to finally come here and see it with my own two eyes. There's

undoubtedly so much more to see out here and I will be back. Anyways, hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, let me know down below. As always, this is

Nolan Fischer, aka the POV channel, and have a good rest of your day.