Why Northern Washington Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History

Washington is a state cut in half by a wall of volcanoes, with a rainforest on one side and a desert on the other, roughly a hundred miles apart. The Hoh Rainforest gets twelve to fourteen feet of rain a year. Parts of the Columbia Basin get six to eight inches. Same state, same latitude, 150 miles. One mountain range does that, and everything else in this video follows from it. There's even a rain shadow inside the rain shadow. Sequim sits directly behind the Olympics and receives about sixteen inches a year — about thirty miles from one of the rainiest places in the contiguous United States, dry enough to grow lavender. None of it was designed. A plate went under a continent and the rest is consequence. The Cascadia Subduction Zone built the volcanic arc, which built the wall, which made the rainforest and the desert. The same tectonic system opened fissures that buried the eastern half of the state under flood basalt more than two miles thick in places. Then an ice-dammed lake in Idaho failed dozens of times, stripping that lava bare and leaving the Channeled Scablands — dry canyons hundreds of feet deep with no rivers in them, and a cliff at Dry Falls three and a half miles wide and four hundred feet high with nothing flowing over it. The silt those floods left got picked up by wind and dropped across the southeast, over two hundred feet deep in places. That's the Palouse: one of the most productive dryland wheat regions on the planet, made of soil blown off the floor of a catastrophe. Then the chain reaction. The Columbia falls 2,700 feet, which made it the most hydroelectrically developed river system on Earth. Grand Coulee — built into a channel the floods had already cut — produced the cheapest electricity in the country at the moment the US entered a world war. Cheap power made aluminium, in a state with no bauxite at all; the ore came thousands of miles, the electricity came from the river. Aluminium converted Boeing from wood to metal. Aerospace buil