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A view through a coulee in Alberta, with steep but lower sides, and water in the bottom. Coulee, or coulée (/ ˈ k uː l eɪ / or / ˈ k uː l iː /), [1] is any of various different landforms, all of which are kinds of valleys or drainage zones. The word coulee comes from the Canadian French coulée, from French couler 'to flow'.
When it was built, Grand Coulee Dam was the largest dam in the world, but it was only part of the irrigation project. Additional dams were built at the north and south ends of Grand Coulee, the dry canyon south of Grand Coulee Dam, allowing the coulee to be filled with water pumped up from the Columbia River.
Meandering rivers, which form a sinuous path in a usually low-gradient plain toward the end of a fluvial system. Anastomosed river is a rare case of a relatively straight, complicated vertical sequence of river deposits with banks held together by dense vegetation .
The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods within the southeastern part of Washington state.
Grand Coulee is two canyons, with an open basin in the middle. The Upper Coulee, filled by Banks Lake, is 25 miles (40 km) long with walls 800 to 900 feet (240 to 270 m) tall. It links to the Columbia River at Grand Coulee Dam and leads southward, through the surrounding highlands. The entry to the coulee is 650 feet (200 m) above the Columbia.
Moses Coulee is the second-largest and westernmost canyon of the Channeled Scablands, located about 30 kilometres (19 mi) to the west of the larger Grand Coulee. This water channel is now dry, but during glacial periods, large outburst floods with discharges greater than 600,000 m 3 /s (21,000,000 cu ft/s) carved the channel. [ 1 ]
Dry Falls is a 3.5-mile-long (5.6 km) scalloped precipice with four major alcoves, in central Washington scablands.This cataract complex is on the opposite side of the Upper Grand Coulee from the Columbia River, and at the head of the Lower Grand Coulee, northern end of Lenore Canyon. [1]
The glacier left behind a blanket of glacial till, up to 50 feet thick in places. This glacial till, composed of clay, silt, sand, gravel, cobblestones, and erratic boulders, covers most of the upper Moses Coulee. The melting glacier discharged both down Moses Coulee and into the Grand Coulee as is evident in the Sims Corner eskers and kames. [8]