page_title: Giant current ripples
section_title: The state of the problem in the 20th century. "Old hypotheses"
hierarchical_section_title: Giant current ripples / History of the research / The state of the problem in the 20th century. "Old hypotheses"
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Мелкие, "обычные", песчаные знаки ряби в полосе вдольбереговых течений на пляже Телецкого озера, Алтай.
context_page_description: Giant current ripples are active channel topographic forms up to 20 m high, which develop within near-talweg areas of the main outflow valleys created by glacial lake outburst floods. Giant current ripple marks are morphologic and genetic macroanalogues of small current ripples formed in sandy stream sediments.
  The giant current ripple marks are important depositional forms in diluvial plain and mountain scablands.
context_section_description: J Harlen Bretz, author of the hypothesis of the diluvial origin of the Channeled Scabland, considered mainly "giant gravel bars" (diluvial ramparts and terraces) among the diluvial-accumulative formations as a proof of his case along with the destructive forms of the scabland (gorges-coulees, waterfall cataracts – chains of erosional dry falls washed of loose sediments by the floods of diluvial farewell rocks).
  It was only after J. T. Pardee's report in Seattle at the Session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1940 that the expression "giant current ripples" was introduced in the modern meaning. J. Pardee gave brief characteristics to the forms found by him already in the early 20th century while researching the Late Pleistocene lake Missoula. J. Pardee, who was the discoverer of this lake and named it, had kept silent for over thirty years until his retirement about cataclysmic outbursts of the giant North-American ice-dammed lakes in the Pleistocene. As already mentioned, the "official" American geology represented by the United States Geological Survey, which strictly controlled all scientific studies, strongly objected to J H. Bretz's hypothesis in the early 20th century. J. Pardee was a member of this organization. Even the title "Ripple marks (?) in the glacial lake Missoula" of Pardee's report proves the great significance attached by Pardee to the relief he discovered a few decades ago as an instrument for the reconstruction of Late Quaternary diluvial palaeohydrology in North America. Thus, it is this scientist's name that we should associate with the discovery and correct genetic interpretation of the relief of giant current ripples. After Pardee's publication in 1942, giant current ripples have been found practically everywhere on the territory of the basaltic Columbia Plateau (this was the direction of the cataclysmic outbursts of Missoula and other ice-dammed lakes).
  A special study of the geomorphology and palaeohydrology of the American scabland was begun by Victor Baker. It was Baker who mapped all main fields of giant current ripples known today in America, and it was he who made first attempts to gain chief hydraulic characteristics of the Missoula floods according to the multiple measurements of paired parameters of diluvial dunes and their mechanical composition. Some other so far known means had certainly been used for the purpose as well since Bretz's times, in particular, the functional dependences by Schezi and Manning. However, those dependences estimated velocities and discharges of the floods at the channel line, and the data received, although imprecise, were tremendous. V. R. Baker calculated the palaeohydraulic data over the ripple fields, i.e. over the sites distanced from the channel line and (or) on wane of the floods, where the current velocities of the diluvial streams admittedly must have been less than maximum ones (all the same, they were hundreds of thousands of cubic metres per second).
  For nearly sixty years the well-known ice-dammed Lake Missoula (and other well-known North-American ice-dammed lakes) and its cataclysmic outbursts was considered as a unique one in the world's scientific literature. Special tourist routes were organised at most impressive sites of "giant vessels", canyons-coulees, vast fields of giant current ripples and others. Here professional guides tell the tourists about hydrospheric catastrophes which took place in the ice ages in America.
  The discovery of the relief of giant current ripples in the Altai and Tuva and its correct diagnostics began a new stage in the paleogeographical research of the continents, a broad international cooperation and initiated new conclusions which have cleared up a lot of questions in the Quaternary geology and Paleohydrology of Pleistocene in Eurasia.
  Along with the development of the ideas about enormous dimensions and a big role of Pleistocene glacier-dammed lakes and their cataclysmic outbursts, a new branch of the scientific research which was called by the British geologist P. A. Carling "flood
caption: Current ripple marks in sand in modern stream in the Altai Republic, Russia
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