"The land between Idaho and the Cascade Mountains in Eastern Washington is characterized by dramatic coulees, gullies, and deserts--in geologic terms, it is a wholly unique place on Earth. J. Harlen Bretz was the iconoclastic geologist who peered back in time to answer the riddle of how this land came to be ... He hypothesized that a catastrophic flood--likely the largest in Earth's history--has scoured the land in a virtual instant. Using nothing more than the core tools of observation, hypothesis, and theory, Bretz recognized that the region's bizarre formations and geologic oddities didn't conform to the patterns of a landscape shaped gradually over time. Instead, the scablands looked more like a partially formed, braided river channel that had spread out over several hundred miles--a topography that could only be caused by a sudden rush of an unprecedented volume of water ... [By] the mid-seventies Landsat satellite photography confirmed his findings, and in 1979 he was awarded the Penrose Medal, the Geological Society of America's most prestigious award."--Dust jacket flap.