Joseph Thomas Pardee (May 30, 1871, in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

, Utah; † March 2, 1960, in Philipsburg, Montana) was a U.S. geologist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, and contributed to the understanding of the origin of the

Channeled Scablands The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods ...

. He discovered the trail of evidence left by Glacial Lake Missoula, a lake created by an ice dam wide and high during the most recent

ice age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages, and g ...

. He discovered that when the dam broke, the water flowed towards the scablands, supporting J Harlen Bretz's theory of the cataclysmic floods.

Biography

Born in Salt Lake City, Joe grew up in a mining family. The family moved to Philipsburg, Montana, when Joe was three, and his father developed the Algonquin mine. Joe's education was at Presbyterian College in Deer Lodge, Montana, and the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university, research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Oakland, the system is co ...

at Berkeley. After college he opened an assay office and operated a gold and sapphire mine, but a growing interest in geology led him to the USGS. He was appointed to the Survey in 1909 and retired in 1941. During 32 years of work, his investigations ranged from glacial deposits to gold deposits, from mine sites to dam sites. Joe Pardee spent most of his career on geology in the northwestern United States, with particular emphasis on Montana. His research in Montana helped to reveal how the

in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Washington were created.See: * * *

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* 20th-century American geologists 1871 births 1960 deaths People from Granite County, Montana University of California, Berkeley alumni {{US-geologist-stub

Biography

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