Open Veils · Answer
Depth of flood deposits in Mississippi underfit river
The Mississippi is a classic 'underfit' river — grotesquely small relative to its valley, which was carved by vastly larger discharge events. Randall Carlson and Martin Sweatman's Comet Research Group attribute the valley's true scale to catastrophic meltwater pulses, not gradualism. Flood deposit depths in the lower valley run to extraordinary thicknesses that orthodox timelines struggle to explain on slow-accumulation models alone.
Evidence
- Randall Carlson has long argued that the Mississippi's valley morphology — braided terraces, giant meander scars, and outsized oxbows — betrays a discharge regime orders of magnitude above anything the modern river produces.
- A recent Pine & Marsh report (May 2026) documents that the Yazoo Delta's defining substrate — Sharkey clay, Dundee silt loam, Yazoo silty clay — runs more than thirty feet deep, representing 10,000 years of Mississippi meandering.
- The valley is 'underfit' in the precise geomorphological sense: the channel is dwarfed by the valley it occupies, implying a former flood regime of continental scale.
- Paul LaViolette and Carlson would argue that the basal layers of that column were laid down rapidly during post-impact flood episodes, not by slow Holocene meandering.