37.2: J Harlen Bretz
- Page ID
- 22826
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J Harlen Bretz is the hero of this story, a geologist who followed the evidence in the landscape to his own conclusion, even though it flew in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy: uniformitarianism. He began his career as a high school teacher in Seattle, but became interested in geology, and soon quit his job so he could pursue graduate school. With a PhD in hand, he began studying a region in eastern Washington state where the farming was so poor that local farmers had dubbed it the “Scablands.” After a spell working back in Seattle at the University of Washington, Bretz settled in at his alma mater, the University of Chicago, in Illinois. Summer field campaigns brought him back repeatedly to the Scablands, where he put his students to work mapping the strange landscape, which was unlike anything they had ever seen.