Wiktionary
n. (context US geography English) High, flat land of igneous rock, with thin soil and deep channels formed by glaciers or glacial floods.
Usage examples of "scabland".
There were signs of catastrophic floods all over, beach terraces, lemniscate islands, channel beds, scablands.
North Rim of the Grand Canyon or the slopes of Denali in summer, crossing the Salt River or the Scablands, coming into Zion from the east, dropping into Panamint Valley from the west, rolling down the Phantom Canyon behind Pikes Peak, winding down Grapevine Canyon into Death Valley .
Later that day they lofted out over the deeper and much wider canyon of Shalbatana, and the signs were even more obvious: tear-shaped islands, curving channels, alluvial plains, scablands.
Some 500 cubic miles of water drained from the lake through the Grand Coulee within a period of about two weeks, scouring the Washington landscape known as the Channeled Scablands and draining into the Pacific through the Columbia Gorge.
If the analogy to the channeled scablands is correct, floods involving water discharges of millions of cubic meters per second and peak flow velocities of tens of meters per second, but lasting perhaps no more than a few days, have occurred on Mars.
When the dams broke through, great torrents had scoured out scablands all the way to the sea.
Nicopolis was a maze of channeled scablands strewn with parts of buildings, broken beams, dislodged boulders, flattened furniture, and slender trees torn from their roots.
Where they disappeared amid the crazed valleys and jumbled boulders of the dusty scablands, the first explorers drew back in defeat, unable to decipher the wild terrain.