Tualatin geologist rewrites the book on the floods that shaped our landscape

PSU professor Scott Burns co-authors a new edition of ‘Cataclysms on the Columbia’

By Ed Johnson

The Times, Nov 12, 2009, Updated Nov 12, 2009

GIDDY ABOUT GEOLOGY – Portland State University professor Scott Burns recently released an updated version of a book about the Missoula flood originally published in 1986.

Ed Johnson / The Times

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When you ask Scott Burns, a Tualatin resident and geology professor at Portland State University, how the subject of his newly released book would be of interest to non-geologists, he gets practically giddy with excitement.

“It’s everywhere in the Northwest,” Burns says. “Everywhere you drive in Portland, you drive from one Missoula flood creation to another. I think people are intrigued by the natural world around them, and how it came to be.”

“Cataclysms on the Columbia” was originally released in 1986, and was co-authored by PSU professors John Eliot Allen and Marjorie Burns (no relation). Scott got involved with a plan to update the book for a second edition about five years ago, but real work on the project has only happened over the last year or so, he says.

The book is divided into eight parts, starting out with a biography of J Harlan Bretz, an early researcher who in 1919 proposed the idea that multiple cataclysmic floods from a great glacial lake were instrumental in forming the topography of the Pacific Northwest. The rest of the book describes the scientific research that proves this theory, using photos and detailed maps to explain its science.

Scott was brought in to update the book’s scientific content from its original edition. As a professor at PSU for 20 years, one of his major areas of study has been the Missoula flood — named because of their origin in a Montana lake — and new research needed to be included in the book.

“We basically had to get started from scratch,” Scott says.

Scott, who grew up in Beaverton, says one of the more interesting parts of the book, at least for local residents, is the chapter describing how the floods shaped the Tualatin and Willamette valleys.

“What we want to do is have people see stuff and relate it to the floods,” Scott says. “(For the Tualatin Valley) it’s the story of massive amounts of water coming in and coming out that created what you see.”

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