Bruce Bjornstad has loved rocks since he was a kid, growing up on the East Coast. But his real love and expertise is the Missoula Floods — cataclysmic events that scoured the Columbia Basin and laid thick deposits of sediments in other areas, washing all the way down the Columbia Gorge and out to the Pacific. These floods also shaped the Hanford area. The lava flows and uplifted mountains also still drive how cleanup proceeds at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Bjornstad gives us a geologic tour from an outlook on the White Bluffs overlooking the Columbia River and Hanford.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, joining you now from a place called White Bluffs Overlook. There is a majestic view of a big bend of the Columbia River here, with the Hanford site past it in the background. We’ve come to talk about geology, deep time and the way they connect to current cleanup operations. Bruce Bjornstad brought us here. He is a geologist and the author of two guidebooks about the Missoula floods, along with a coffee table book full of photographs about that geologic event that happened over and over. Bruce Bjornstad, welcome to Think Out Loud and thanks for taking us here.
Bruce Bjornstad: Yeah, you’re welcome. Good to be here.
Miller: Why did you take us here?
Bjornstad: Well, when Anna asked that I come out here with you guys.
Miller: This is Anna King, our co-producer for the week.
Bjornstad: Yep. This is the first place that came to mind because you have a beautiful overlook, practically of the whole Hanford site. The river is just down below us. It’s several 100 feet below us. It kind of sweeps around through the landscape. And you can see the vitrification plant here, some of the other waste facilities and the old abandoned nuclear reactors spread out along the river.
Miller: You can also see mountains circling almost, I don’t know, 270 degrees here around us.
What are some of the mountains here?
Bjornstad: Oh, yeah. The mountains, looking off to the south here, you can look straight on to Rattlesnake Mountain which is the highest mountain here in Eastern Washington. The Gable Mountain is out there. It’s another one of these anticlinal ridges of basalt that were squeezed up during tectonic forces over the last 17 million years. The Saddle Mountains is another one of these anticlinales off to the north and to the right of us.
Miller: Let’s go back, not in geologic time, but in your own life’s time. How did you first get interested in rocks and geology?
Bjornstad: So, when I was a kid and with my friends, I used to look at rocks. And occasionally, in New Hampshire where I grew up, you’d see something sparkly on the ground and I wouldn’t just walk by, I would pick it up and kind of look at it. One time I thought I’d find some gold, and I took it back to my parents and they said “no, that’s probably fool’s gold,” which is pyrite. It’s not worth anything. But I was attracted to rocks back as a child. And then I didn’t really think about it until I went to college and ended up starting to take geology classes, and decided that’s what I wanted to do.
Miller: How’d you end up here?
Bjornstad: When I went to apply for a graduate degree, a master’s degree in geology. I looked around at the colleges that were in the Pacific Northwest, and I knew I didn’t want to go to Portland State because it was too crowded, too many people. And I saw that there was a graduate program at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, near Spokane. And I applied for there. I got accepted and I actually got a grant to study there for my master’s degree.
From Spokane, I was looking for a job, and then one of my counselors advised me to come down here to Hanford and said they were providing jobs for geologists down here. They’re looking for geologists down here in the Tri Cities. So that’s how I got down here.
Miller: Why did the folks at Hanford want geologists?
Bjornstad: So at the time, there was a big study going on called the Basalt Waste Isolation Project. And that was a study funded by the Department of Energy to find a permanent repository for nuclear waste, mostly defense waste related to defense of the country. So they were proposing a deep repository 5,000 ft down into the basalt at Hanford. That’s where I worked for several years, until about 10 years later, then they eventually decided this wasn’t such a great place.
Miller: Why not?
Bjornstad: Because the basalts they were looking at to bury waste were under the water table and they were saturated with water. So if they dug a tunnel deep underground, it would be filled with water. And they were worried about water interacting with the waste and allowing it to escape.
Miller: So it was productive… I mean, you and others were brought on to say, “hey, can we do this?”
Bjornstad: Right.
Miller: You drilled…
Bjornstad: It was a feasibility study.
Miller: And the answer was it’s not feasible.
Bjornstad: Right, right. So it ended up going to the Waste Repository in New Mexico – I think it is where they finally decided, And they actually built a repository that’s active today.
Miller: My understanding is that for folks who are listening to our conversations earlier this week, where we talked about the pilot project of sending grouted [waste] – meaning, sort of solidified, cemented waste – to either Texas or New Mexico, that the project is still in the pilot phase and might happen. It seems like that is the replacement plan for what you looked into 40-plus years ago, which now I guess is not going to happen here.
Bjornstad: Right, right.
Miller: That’s because of the water table.
Bjornstad: Right and really none of the waste, or hardly any of the waste that’s here at Hanford has gone to the New Mexico site, the WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] site, they call it.
Miller: Not yet, but it’s possible in the future it will.
Bjornstad: But then there are transportation issues getting the waste down there. And there’s lots of people kind of saying that that’s not a good idea. So, all the waste is still here at Hanford. It’s in the tanks and being stored temporarily here.
Miller: Let’s go back to this landscape here. I know one of the geological processes, repetitive processes that you spent a lot of time thinking about, studying and taking photographs to show us is the Missoula floods. So, for folks who either have heard that phrase and have forgotten about it, or maybe have never heard about them, where do we start with the Missoula floods?
Bjornstad: OK. Well, here at Hanford, a lot of people don’t realize that this was ground zero for dozens of ice age floods that came through here as recently as 14,000 years ago. They came down from the Spokane area, Glacial Lake Missoula up in Montana, down through Idaho and into the channeled Scabland of Eastern Washington. And a lot of that water ended up coming right directly through the Hanford area.
Miller: And is the idea that there were huge ice dams holding back just an immense amount of water?
Bjornstad: Yes, so 500 cubic miles of water behind an ice dam in Northern Idaho.
Miller: What would happen when that dam would break?
Bjornstad: Well, we know it happened very quickly. It failed very quickly because the water came out very and had to have come out very quickly to produce the features that we see downstream. So, the lake probably drained in a matter of three days, and it took about three weeks for all the water to make its way out to the Pacific Ocean.
Miller: If we were standing up here when one of those dams broke, would we be underwater even up here?
Bjornstad: Yes.
Miller: We’re hundreds of feet above where Columbia is right now.
Bjornstad: Right and we’re at 900 feet elevation here. The floods got one another 300 feet over the top of us here at this location.
Miller: Wow.
Bjornstad: You can see Gable Mountain out there in the valley. Gable Mountain’s about 1,200 feet. So the water went up to and maybe a little higher than Gable Mountain out there in the center of the valley.
Miller: Somehow being up here, being almost 1,000 ft above the river, and imagining the water 200 feet even higher above us, it is so hard to imagine.
Bjornstad: It is, it is.
Miller: What was in that water that would have been rushing way above our heads and all across this landscape?
Bjornstad: Well, mostly water, would have been like a slurry of water and mud. The floods were picking up, ripping up boulders and soil along the way, so it was very turbid. It’s probably the color of chocolate milk with a slurry of mud mixed in.
Miller: And all of that soil, mud and other organic matter was deposited just everywhere from here to the Pacific?
Bjornstad: When it came into valleys like this where the water could spread out, it would deposit hundreds of feet of sediment.
Miller: Which is why we just passed tons of orchards and why people can grow a lot of anything they want in the Willamette Valley and other agricultural parts with amazing soil.
Bjornstad: Yeah. And the Yakima Valley and the Walla Walla Valley, which are connected to the Pasco Basin where we are, were back-flooded areas. They were dead end valleys where the floodwater went into but had no place to go but just sit there. So it sat, all the sediment settled out and created the great soils that we have in those areas now, which are supporting a very rich agriculture.
Miller: Who was the person who first put this forward as a geological theory?
Bjornstad: The original idea of the ice age floods came from J. Harlen Bretz.
Miller: And how did the geological establishment respond to his idea?
Bjornstad: Well, at first, back in Bretz’s time, most people believed that the present is the key to the past and that what we see today has been going on all the way back through history. And here Bretz was proposing something outrageous and catastrophic.
Miller: Oh, and recent too. What was hard to believe, according to other geologists, [was] that profound landscape-wide changes could happen that quickly?
Bjornstad: Right. So, yeah, he fell out of favor with most of his fellow geologists. But over time, more and more data and evidence were gathered to actually prove that Bretz was right.
Miller: Did he live to be vindicated?
Bjornstad: Yeah. He died in 1979, and a year before he died, he was given the Penrose Medal by the Geological Society of America.
Miller: Is that a big deal?
Bjornstad: Yeah, that’s one of the highest honors you can earn as a geologist. And his only regret is that he outlived all his critics.
Miller: Oh, so he lived to be vindicated, but his critics didn’t live to see his vindication.
Bjornstad: He outlived most of those critics.
Miller: And that bothered him?
Bjornstad: It didn’t bother Bretz.
Miller: [Laughter] He was alive.
Bjornstad: Yeah, yeah. So he lived to tell about it.
Miller: What does it mean to you to think about those changes happening so recently? I mean, my understanding is the mountains around here, that’s basalt that may have been pushed up and moved around a little bit, but it was laid down from volcanoes tens of millions of years ago?
Bjornstad: Yeah, the oldest basalts here in the Pacific Northwest are around 17 million years and the youngest flows here about 10 [million years].
Miller: But you’re talking about floods here happening 15,000 years ago or 17,000 – essentially just a blink in the eye of geological time.
Bjornstad: Exactly.
Miller: So, when you look at a landscape now, this landscape, how do you think about those different kinds of time scales?
Bjornstad: The basalts themselves, 17 million, that’s just like yesterday in geologic time.
Miller: Even that as yesterday?
Bjornstad: In geologic time. So it’s kind of like it’s easier if you can think back 17 million years ago, it’s easy to think back to the beginning of the earth at 4.5 billion years. That’s the beginning of geologic time for us. So, yeah, geologic time is a hard nut to crack because it’s so broad, huge and expansive
Miller: And inhuman.
Bjornstad: Right. Yeah. And it puts some perspective on what created the universe.
Miller: Meanwhile, speaking of what created the universe, we can see some of the industrial sites brought around here in Hanford, places where humans started manipulating some of those fundamental powers in previously unimaginable ways. I mean, harnessing the power of the elements. How do you think about the long-term storage of the waste that was produced here as a geologist?
Bjornstad: It’s a problem that needs to be addressed. And there have been many solutions offered on how to do that. They could potentially drill some holes or some caverns in Rattlesnake Mountain or Gable Mountain that are above the water table, and maybe dispose of it there. And that might be a better solution. But still, there’s a lot of politics involved. We learned from our past experience that the government and the population isn’t really ready for anybody to dispose of waste here. So I have my doubts it’ll ever happen.
Miller: Meanwhile, there are still 150 tanks currently that have radioactive waste in them sprinkled around the landscape right in front of us. What’s going on underneath the ground there?
Bjornstad: So those tanks are sitting in soil that are flood deposits, mostly flood deposits that were brought in by the Missoula floods. They are up to 100-200 maybe even 300 feet thick, down to the water table. And then you have another 300 feet of sediment of what we call the Ringold Formation, which is an older deposit of sand deposited by the Columbia River. So there’s a very thick sequence of sediment underneath those tanks.
Fortuitously, the tanks, some of them are leaking but they’re not going very far down into the ground because of that thick sediment. And the really nasty contaminants associated – strontium, plutonium and other nasty elements that are in those wastes – usually get absorbed by the sediment within a few meters of the surface.
Miller: As opposed to traveling far and hitting the groundwater, or going immediately and in large quantities into the river?
Bjornstad: Yep.
Miller: So that’s just good luck. I mean, Matthias or whoever, they wouldn’t have known what was 200 feet below the surface as they flew around here.
Bjornstad: Right. They were clueless about the geology of this area. We didn’t know until later, until 10 or 20 years later, how fortunate it was that they picked this site for waste.
Miller: What do you think this place might look like in a million years?
Bjornstad: A million years? OK. Well, that’s a long time.
Miller: You’ve also said you can imagine 3.5 billion years. That’s one of the things about … I mean, geologists, I guess you ping back and forth between tomorrow and 3 billion years ago.
Bjornstad: Yeah, that’s true.
Miller: But you can choose the time frame, but put us some time in the future.
Bjornstad: OK. Well, in the future, those ridges that we see – Rattlesnake and Saddle Mountains – those are anticlinal ridges of the salt and they’ve been forming for the last 17 million years. Those ridges will probably continue to rise, shift and change as the earth crust is getting squeezed from the north and south
Miller: Those will go up. What about the Columbia itself?
Bjornstad: The Columbia River is kind of cut down. The level of the Columbia River is controlled by what the river is doing down in the Columbia Gorge and other areas nearby. And I suspect that Columbia is probably going to stay where it is pretty much, it’s kind of established. The Cascade Mountains could erupt some more which could raise the level of the river. I don’t know. It’s possible.
Miller: Do you think in a million years there will be any evidence visually that humans came here in 1943 and made plutonium?
Bjornstad: Well, the Vit Plant will probably continue to stay where it is.
Miller: In a million years, you think that building will still be there?
Bjornstad: Some remnants of it.
Miller: Some plastic?
Bjornstad: Yeah, there’s concrete. Lots of concrete.
Miller: Is concrete likely to last for many years?
Bjornstad: Yeah. It’s stable.
Miller: It’ll say we were here.
Bjornstad: And there’s lots of other places where there’s calcrete. And the tanks themselves, ah, may still be there. If they haven’t drained them by that time, there could still be tanks in a million years.
Miller: All right.
Bjornstad: Yeah, a lot of hypotheticals.
Miller: It’s a good place to end though. Thank you very much.
Bjornstad: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Well, thank you for having us here. Bruce Bjornstad is a geologist and author. He’s written two guidebooks about the Missoula floods.
That’s it for us today and for our whole week in Richland. Thanks very much to the folks at Washington State University Tri-Cities and Northwest Public Broadcasting for hosting us. And a huge special thanks to Anna King. Anna, you welcomed us, fed us, introduced us to folks in town, set up interviews, fact checked us. You were simply an indispensable part of our week here. A true co-producer on behalf of our whole team. Thank you.
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