Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood

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The masterful story of the scientific rebel who dared to think outside the box—and changed the course of geologic history.

The land between Idaho and the Cascade Mountains is characterized by gullies, coulees, and deserts—in geologic terms, it is a wholly unique place on the earth. In the 1920s, legendary geologist and professor J. Harlen Bretz peered back in time to answer the riddle of how this land came to be, becoming one of the first people to explore the area. Defying the conventional wisdom of his peers, Bretz saw a landscape that had been instantly scoured by a flood of unprecedented scale. Though met with public and academic humiliation—his theory sounded too much like the biblical flood—Bretz persevered and went on to discover what everyone else had failed to see.

Bretz’s Flood tells the dramatic story of this scientific maverick—how he came to study the region, his radical theory that a huge flood created it, and how the mainstream geologic community campaigned to derail him from pursuing an idea that satellite photos would confirm decades later.