Dry Falls, in central Washington, has a stunningly dramatic history: At the end of the last glaciation, when ice dams to the east gave way, torrents of water roared through the landscape from flooded Montana, pouring over a 400-foot rock face at 65 mph in a waterfall five times as wide as Niagara and carrying 10 times the flow of all the world’s rivers combined.

The scale of the cataclysm is hard to imagine, so geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University commissioned these animations from Newlands & Company of Portland to help to convey its magnitude.