Paleohydrology of Late Pleistocene Superflooding, Altay Mountains, Siberia

Abstract

Cataclysmic flooding is a geomorphological process of planetary significance. Landforms of flood origin resulted from late Pleistocene ice-dammed lake failures in the Altay Mountains of south-central Siberia. Peak paleoflows, which exceeded 18 x 10(6) cubic meters per second, are comparable to the largest known terrestrial discharges of freshwater and show a hydrological scaling relation to floods generated by catastrophic dam failures. These seem to have been Earth's greatest floods, based on a variety of reconstructed paleohydraulic parameters.