> The Columbia River Gorge was carved out in two weeks.
This seemed interesting, so I looked into it, and I'm seeing multiple sources saying it was many floods over a few millennia (with one large initial one from Lake Missoula).
About 1800 years ago, the Columbia Basin became flooded when an ice dam broke at Lake MIssoula in Western Montana. This lake help approximately 600 cubic miles of water. Boulders were tossed around the outlet of the break. Others were carried in icebergs as far as Western Oregon towards the Pacific Ocean. The water flowed at appoximately 60mph. It is believed that it took 2-3 days for this water to drain.
During a period of 2500 years, there were believed to be as many as 100 floods that scoured the Gorge area. These were some of the largest documented floods occuring on the planet and in geological history.[1]
The 1800 is likely supposed to be 18,000 years ago, as this other link says essentially the same thing but at the time brame of 18,000 - 15,000 years ago.[2]
That said, neither source their facts well, so it's not out of the question that one is using the other or they are using some other source, and they are wrong and referencing wrong information in a chain, so I would consider a reputable source one way or the other as more definitive.
The one person who logged the most time, effort, and miles studying the Scablands considered the evidence to best support a single event, but was stymied identifying a source for enough water. He was ridiculed by other geologists for many decades, and pushed to accept the less catastrophist interpretation of multiple floods before he was, finally, awarded Geology's highest prize--after all of his opponents had died.
Recent evidence suggests a meteor or comet strike in the Canadian ice sheet, at start of the 1200-year Younger Dryas cold spell, that could have melted enough water, and appears responsible also for the simultaneous extinction of 32+ genera of large North American mammals (including camels, horses, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats, cheetahs, giant sloths, mastodons and mammoths), as well as the Clovis culture, at the same instant, and the Younger Dryas itself.
That evidence includes shocked minerals and a platinum abundance spike found in the correct layer of the Greenland ice sheet, and in earth at sites throughout North America and as far afield as Syria and South Africa.
The Columbia River Gorge was carved out in two weeks.