DON J. EASTERBROOK DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIST AWARD: SEEKING SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING AND CONSILIENCE IN THE STUDY OF SUPERFLOODS

Very large, high-energy floods are both rare and dangerous. Most of what we know of them comes from studies of their effects. Although nature has been subtle in providing evidence of those effects, the greatest obstacles to the science of superfloods come from errors of scientific logic, including wrong-headed notions of uniformitarianism, simplicity, and hypothesis verification and testing. In contrast to dogma that is commonly portrayed as philosophy of science, there was no theory of superfloods to be tested and confirmed by observation and experiment. Rather, the science proceeded quite the other way around. Observations of superflood effects led to hypotheses that identified surprising new phenomena which turned out to be related to those originally envisioned, but in unanticipated ways. This form of hypothesis confirmation was first termed "consilience" by William Whewell in 1840, and it provides one of the most powerful experiences in the life of a scientist. During the last 30 years knowledge of superfloods has grown as a coherent, interrelated web of hypotheses and observations that relate, among other things, (1) late Pleistocene flood phenomena discovered along the margins of continental ice sheets and mountain glaciers in North America and Asia, (2) the immense flood channels discovered on the planet Mars, and (3) the developing methods of paleoflood hydrology leading to global records of Holocene floods. Moreover, the increased understanding of superfloods is enlarging our views of the nature of continental ice sheets during the last major glaciation, the role of floods in shaping the channels of bedrock rivers, the nature of flood hazards as they impact humankind, and the climatic/tectonic evolution of Mars and the global climate change that impacted that planet.