The Great Flood of Glacial Lake Missoula – A Foray into Catastrophism with Randall Carlson
A topic that's kept me from doom scrolling the political discourse of our time
Introduction
From the earliest days of my education, I was taught to understand that some of the greatest mysteries surrounding the origin of human civilization had been answered. Fundamentally complex questions had more-or-less simple answers. Where did we come from? Monkeys, obviously. What are we doing here? Monkey business, one presumes. Or if you subscribe to the more traditional narrative, the same two questions above could be answered respectively: God and His works.
But either way, I knew that no further investigation would be required on my part. Academia and religious institutions had the answers.
And then there was the apocryphal and depressing meme in the mid-2010s that was profound to my 20-something year-old mind: “Born too late to explore new continents, born too early to explore the Solar System.”
The mysteries of our civilization had been neatly packaged as a historical narrative, perfectly charted as a linear progression: We were monkeys who became people around 200,000 years ago (plus or minus divine intervention), and then for approximately 190,000 years, human beings spread out all over the Earth but never managed to do more than forage for berries, pick lice off one another, and smash strangers with big rocks. We call this the Stone Age or prehistory. Then, suddenly, about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age (or Pleistocene), those same human brains — which hadn’t done much more than paint some caves and fasten rocks to sticks — developed agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, fermentation, mathematics, language and other activities we know as civilization. And this occurred in peoples mutually exclusively throughout the globe. We went from rock-tipped wooden spears to space travel inside of 6,000 years. Or, more poignantly, we went from the steam engine to space travel inside of 350 years. And yet the consensus amongst mainstream academia is that the 7,000 generations of humans prior to that were too smooth-brained to observe that putting seeds in the ground caused plants to grow.
This gets me to the point. For anyone who knows me, you know that simple solutions fed to me by others does not scratch the proverbial itch (no thanks to the lice). What remains to be discovered about our past could be some of the most important questions of our time. How old is human civilization? Have there been highly sophisticated human civilizations deep in pre-history? Is there evidence of their existence? If so, what were their values? What did they prioritize technologically and civically?
Every human on the planet today are legacies of those ancestors. Do we not owe them the honor and duty of discovery? Answering these questions would fundamentally change our perspective as a species, our connection to the universe. It could bring us closer to God.
If we understood how perilously fragile our systems for preserving knowledge are, we might find the truth in the ancients’ teachings. We might understand the cause for precision in ancient architecture that still confounds engineers and builders today. If we look past the graffiti scratched into stone and analyze the stones themselves, we see a greater mystery than anything dreamed-up by some Hollywood coke-head’s script. From Peru to Egypt and Turkey to Japan, there are sites that beggar belief — that demand further investigation and analysis.
Researchers have produced voluminous bodies of work detailing the anomalies of the ancient world. Despite the maligning of people who bring our attention to these anomalies, there is momentum growing in the interest and study of our collective ancient past.
I have stood beneath the Trilithon stones of Baalbek in Lebanon. I’ve been grifted into riding a camel at the Great Pyramid of Giza. I’ve hiked all throughout the ancient city of Petra in Jordan; I wish I knew then the hypotheses I’ve been introduced to now. Perhaps it will soon be time to return.
The Great Flood and the Younger Dryas
What if the ancient traditions about a global flood caused by God’s wrath to punish humanity wasn’t merely an metaphorical allegory told by our ancestors, but a historical account of an incomprehensible reshaping of the face of the Earth 12,800 years ago? What if we are simply waking up from a multi-millennia-long stupor to observe our ancient past? Researcher and writer Graham Hancock and has contended for decades that we are a “species with amnesia”, and he has been ridiculed incessantly for it despite an increasing body of peer-reviewed work that supports his hypotheses. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is one significant explanation in understanding our place in history.
To establish consensus on the Younger Dryas is foundational to understanding anything else about ancient history. It is the linchpin event on which we must agree, that some cataclysmic event occurred, for any accounting of lost ancient civilizations. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Let’s start with the facts undisputed by the secular scientific community. The Pleistocene is the universally accepted epoch which occurred from 2.58 million years ago to ~12,800 years ago. To put a finer point on it, the Pleistocene ended between 12,800-11,600 years ago after lasting millions of years before Earth entered the Holocene, which we occupy presently. Something inarguably catastrophic must have occurred to end millions of years of relative climatic consistency. During this Ice Age, half of North America was covered in a 1.5 mile to 2.5-mile-thick sheet of ice. All of Canada, from coast to coast, was covered in a block of ice. Think the Wall from Game of Thrones but double the thickness and lengthen it 10x. That’s what loomed over the modern-day U.S.-Canada border.
Something ended the Pleistocene 12,800 years ago. Something caused this ice to melt rapidly. For decades researchers and analysts have hypothesized the cause for this dramatic shift in Earth’s climate. There are competing theories on the progenitor of this cataclysm: rapid global warming, comet or asteroid impacts; the more esoteric explanations relate to our Sun and a cyclical micro-nova and a polar shift. I am not discrediting it, I just have no basis for explaining it eloquently, nor am I scientifically literate enough to argue its minutiae. Ben Davidson of Suspicious 0bservers has a compelling argument, but I have only a mere Bachelor’s degree in YouTube Research Studies and TikTok Analytical Reasoning.
However, one example of a recently documented extreme solar outburst is the Carrington Event, which occurred on September 1st and 2nd in 1859. During a solar maximum, this solar flare burned telegraph lines across North America and injured telegraph operators. Aurora borealis were observable midday at the equator. That was 1859. If a solar storm like that hit us today, there would be more damage than a few burnt fingertips tapping out Morse Code. Planes would fall out of the sky, and not only as a result of Boeing’s effort to increase equity.
It's not just that the ice melted and that the planet warmed up. The mega fauna of north America died off almost instantaneously. They weren’t hunted to extinction—seriously, look up the size of a short-faced bear or wooly mammoth and tell me human beings hunted these beasts to extinction as small groups of spear-chucking, loin-clothed stone-agers. Humans couldn’t even eradicate the majority of the buffalo in the American plains until the advent of the carbine, yet somehow we are to believe ancient humans battled literal behemoths to extinction while trying to survive in small factions in the tundra? Does it make sense that human beings made extinct the wooly mammoth but not the buffalo (which almost exclusively sustained Native Americans across the plains for thousands of years)? American Buffalo are not extinct yet, either. There’s a buffalo ranch right down the street from me in Missoula.
In 2007, the Comet Research Group proposed the most cogent and well researched hypothesis that the Younger Dryas was caused by the Earth entering into the debris field of a large comet’s path some 12,800 years ago.
The Comet Research Group is comprised of 63 scientists from 55 universities in 16 countries. This group has produced the most significant body of work investigating the Younger Dryas and its possible cause. The Comet Research Group hypothesizes that thousands of airbursts decimated the landscape of North America and northern Europe. For scale, the meteor impact in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia was a single airburst event that leveled 80,000,000 trees in an instant and could be felt around the world. If it impacted over a major city instead, millions of people would have been instantly vaporized.
Refuting the impact hypothesis, according to Wikipedia, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is:
“an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation that it was caused by a significant reduction of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America [bold, mine].”
What caused the “sudden influx” of water, Wikipedia? Sudden doesn’t imply thousands of years of gradual melting. Something caused this rapid cooling of the Atlantic Ocean and deglaciation of North America. Remember: an ice sheet — from coast to coast of North America — at least a mile and a half thick.
And something caused the sea levels to rise a minimum of 350’. Think of every coastal city everywhere suddenly being covered in 350’ of water. For some perspective, look at the Yonaguni Monument in Japan, a megalithic site that’s been lost to the sea for untold generations. There’s a megalithic city at the bottom of Lake Van in Turkey — attributed to my fellow Armos (shout-out) — what happened there? How do we know it was built only 3,000 years ago if it was discovered in the last twenty years? Nobody knows nothin’ until further surveys are taken.
Glacial Lake Missoula — A Tour with Randall Carlson
There is no dispute (within the secular scientific community, as my wife reminds me) that Glacial Lake Missoula existed until approximately 11,600 years ago. It was a body of water containing roughly 600 cubic miles of water and had a high-water mark of 4,200 feet above sea-level. This is evidenced by the iconic strand lines on Mount Jumbo and Mount Sentinel in Missoula.
According to the gradualist approach, the visible strandlines throughout the Flathead and Bitterroot Valleys in Western Montana indicate the various water levels at different increments of the many draining events of Glacial Lake Missoula that occurred over the millennia. Estimates range between 25 and 89 draining events of this massive lake occurring throughout history, with ice dams forming to plug the lake’s draining at various intervals. The multiple flood theory goes back to the 1850s, when gradualism emerged (and remains) as the preeminent explanation for the world around us: we observe small erosional changes in our world and extrapolate that over time.
Enter the Montana Mega Floods tour with Cosmographer Randall Carlson — a man whose interests truly epitomize the definition of the word Cosmographia: “on the totality of the world.” Randall’s theory is that Glacial Lake Missoula flooded and drained in a singular, apocalyptic event.
I first learned of Randall Carlson, like many of the fifty or so tour attendees through podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Netflix shows like Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse. Of course, Rogan and Hancock have been pre-bunked as tinfoil-hatted conspiracy mongers by the same gatekeepers who told you that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, that COVID-19 came from bat soup, that Iraq had WMD and Afghanistan was the “good war”. Why investigate anything further when the well of truth seekers is thoroughly poisoned?
Those gatekeepers are cut from the same cloth as the dorks who re-defined “hunter-gatherer” when sophisticated structures, estimated to be at least 11,600 years old, were found at Gobekli Tepi in Turkey in the 1990s, so as to not disrupt the “well established” timeline of civilization. If CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post unanimously agree on a negative portrayal of a theory or person, I’m inclined to believe the opposite is true. When was the last time you gleaned an interesting or profound perspective on reality from a mainstream propagandist?
Randall’s work has been most recently featured prominently in Episode 8 of Ancient Apocalypse, the most dangerous show on Netflix — the linked article is a deep meditation provided by an author who also wrote this big-brain take more recently: Why Henry Cavill is wrong to be cross with sex scenes. I assume this author is nothing more than devious, degenerate pervert, wholly based on an article I skimmed — I’d say the treatment he gave Hancock is equally misrepresentative.
For the last 30 years, Randall Carlson has been instrumental in developing the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. Well before the Comet Research Group’s first publication, Carlson advocated for the catastrophic reshaping of the surface of the Earth during the Younger Dryas. He is by all measures a foremost expert on gathering scientific data to weave a cogent theory from a tapestry of fragmented areas of study: geology, astronomy, history, ancient lore, geometry, physics. This is a man whose entire life’s work has been dedicated to education and understanding the physical and the esoteric. At the very least, his ideas warrant consideration.
Meeting Randall in person, you immediately feel welcomed by his gregarious and candid nature. He seems to have no pretenses and is warm and approachable. There’s a Socrates-like aspect about him in that when you ask him questions, he may respond with a question in kind. Almost to a fault, Randall has all the time in the world to sit with you, answer questions openly, and relate as if there aren’t fifty other people who have the exact same pressing desire to bounce their most absurd ideas off him. It was my absolute pleasure to have essentially unfettered access to pick his brain about the topics of ancient history and cataclysms. I would call the tour a “safe space”, where no theory was too outlandish for consideration, even if it’s objective nonsense, like, say: the Moon is hollow. That sounds like total bullshit, right? Then you look into who wrote that 1970 article and it’s…weird. Too much rabbit hole, not enough Megaflood. I’ll try to stay focused on the observable and spooky wonders in Montana.
One of Randall Carlson’s missions in these tours is to impart the language of catastrophe onto his audience. Whereas the gradualist approach has been used conventionally to explain the geological landscape around us, Randall Carlson firmly falls into the category of catastrophist. His investigations into the geological landscape are of not only this region but global phenomena — to mitigate confirmation bias and improve the analysis. Randall says it best when he says to imagine the flow of all the rivers in the world: the Amazon, the Nile, the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Danube, the Po, and on and on. All river flows in the world combined made up about 1/100th of the water flow of Lake Missoula into the plains of eastern Washington state. Randall is more famous for his tours of the Eastern Washington Scablands. This is where you can see the true impacts of Missoula’s flood. Does gradualism explain 18,000 ton boulders from Canada being scattered across the plains of eastern Washington? Gradualism certainly doesn’t account for the absolute scouring and shredding of the geological landscape throughout western Montana.
Prior to the Younger Dryas, the landscape of the top half of North America was unrecognizable in almost every sense of the word to what it is today. The scope and scale of destruction was beyond any observable catastrophe in the modern era. A flood which obliterated mountainsides, crushing and grinding into “glacial till” all manner of biology and geology in its path; it created sediment layers that are hundreds of feet deep — today it’s just the verdant and fertile farm valleys and cattle ranches.
For five days we drove, hiked, and observed the panhandle of Idaho and Western Montana, observing the residue of catastrophe, now presenting as the idyllic, pristine countryside the state is known for. The high water mark of 4,200’ always considered wherever we stopped for a lecture on the geography around us. We observed the effects of water tornadoes called kolks, which drilled into the bedrock as if it were beach sand. Tide ripples caused by receding water that are 50’ high dot the landscape of Camas Prairie; the story of catastrophe told in every landscape we toured. From the National Bison Range, the strandlines of the beachhead are observable nearly all the way to the peaks of the Mission Mountains.
Let’s assume that a single catastrophic flood of Lake Missoula is the correct interpretation of the landscape we toured. The impact to all existing life on earth must have been similarly catastrophic: animals, humans, plants. If the damage to North America is so clearly evident, what happened to landscapes elsewhere on the planet?
Joining Randall as tour co-hosts were Brad Young, Ben VanKerkwyk of UnchartedX, Russ & Kyle of The Brothers of the Serpent, and Darren Grimes of the Grimerica podcast.
I’ve spent an almost embarrassing amount of time consuming the videos and content the aforementioned creators have produced over the last two years, but the subject matter is just so damn interesting. When you actually see these megalithic sites, you think: How was this done? What else did these people do? Take for example the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza. Then you compare Khufu’s ship next to his pyramid and think “hmm…is this the guy?”. It’d be like me putting my name on Dostoevsky’s works and burying them in a time capsule for a thousand years. A thousand years later, I’m a genius and that brooding, Russian epileptic pee-pants is forgotten to history. Who’s The Idiot now?
Look at the photos below. The first photo is of Khufu’s Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. The pyramid is 480’ tall, comprised of millions of single to multi-ton limestone blocks, and was encased in perfectly polished granite casing stones. It is aligned perfectly to true north and the interior contains sophisticated chambers with resonant and acoustic qualities of a still undermined purpose. No mummies or Egyptian hieroglyphics were ever found inside.
The photo below is of Khufu’s ship. The ship of the Pharaoh who built the above pyramid. Would you trust this vessel to navigate any sizeable body of water with your family aboard?
We are to believe the same society of builders developed and completed both of these feats of engineering in Khufu’s lifetime.
Even if everything Randall presents is nonsense, and it’s all just a grift; well, I have to say it was one of the best tour experiences of my life. The group of fellow attendees were my type of people: total dorks, passionately engaged in all the thought experiments life has to offer. Good company, great laughs, compelling conversations. And for God’s sake — in a world inundated with boring, mundane perspectives — at least it’s interesting. For that, I’d gladly tour with them again.
Because if they’re wrong, and we don’t have any questions about our past to answer, then the most pressing question of our time really is whether or not Taylor Swift’s private jet will make it from Japan to Las Vegas, so she can watch her boyfriend play sports ball in the big sports dome tomorrow. What a bummer.
One of those mysteries to me is those stones in South America can’t remember where, that are cut with laser like precision, but randomly. Like “ let’s make this fit here” and some guy comes by with the stone sculpting machine and just makes it fit! And to this day, no stone mason can ever explain it. Oh yeah, with Bronze Age tools no less.
Well done! Ty