The Elements of Geology Part 13

BARRIER REEFS. Reefs separated from the sh.o.r.e by a ship channel of quiet water, often several miles in width and sometimes as much as three hundred feet in depth, are known as barrier reefs. The seaward face rises abruptly from water too deep for coral growth.

Low islands are cast up by the waves upon the reef, and inlets give place for the ebb and flow of the tides. Along the west coast of the island of New Caledonia a barrier reef extends for four hundred miles, and for a length of many leagues seldom approaches within eight miles of the sh.o.r.e.

ATOLLS. These are ring-shaped or irregular coral islands, or island-studded reefs, inclosing a central lagoon. The narrow zone of land, like the rim of a great bowl sunken to the water's edge, rises hardly more than twenty feet at most above the sea, and is covered with a forest of trees such as the cocoanut, whose seeds can be drifted to it uninjured from long distances. The white beach of coral sand leads down to the growing reef, on whose outer margin the surf is constantly breaking. The sea face of the reef falls off abruptly, often to depths of thousands of feet, while the lagoon varies in depth from a few feet to one hundred and fifty or two hundred, and exceptionally measures as much as three hundred and fifty feet.

THEORIES OF CORAL REEFS. Fringing reefs require no explanation, since the depth of water about them is not greater than that at which coral can grow; but barrier reefs and atolls, which may rise from depths too great for coral growth demand a theory of their origin.

Darwin's theory holds that barrier reefs and atolls are formed from fringing reefs by SUBSIDENCE. The rate of sinking cannot be greater than that of the upbuilding of the reef, since otherwise the corals would be carried below their depth and drowned. The process is ill.u.s.trated in Figure 161, where v represents a volcanic island in mid ocean undergoing slow depression, and ss the sea level before the sinking began, when the island was surrounded by a fringing reef. As the island slowly sinks, the reef builds up with equal pace. It rears its seaward face more steep than the island slope, and thus the intervening s.p.a.ce between the sinking, narrowing land and the outer margin of the reef constantly widens. In this intervening s.p.a.ce the corals are more or less smothered with silt from the outer reef and from the land, and are also deprived in large measure of the needful supply of food and oxygen by the vigorous growth of the corals on the outer rim. The outer rim thus becomes a barrier reef and the inner belt of r.e.t.a.r.ded growth is deepened by subsidence to a ship channel, s's' representing sea level at this time. The final stage, where the island has been carried completely beneath the sea and overgrown by the contracting reef, whose outer ring now forms an atoll, is represented by s"s".

In very many instances, however, atolls and barrier reefs may be explained without subsidence. Thus a barrier reef may be formed by the seaward growth of a fringing reef upon the talus of its sea face. In Figure 162 f is a fringing reef whose outer wall rises from about one hundred and fifty feet, the lower limit of the reef-building species. At the foot of this submarine cliff a talus of fallen blocks t acc.u.mulates, and as it reaches the zone of coral growth becomes the foundation on which the reef is steadily extended seaward. As the reef widens, the polyps of the circ.u.mference flourish, while those of the inner belt are r.e.t.a.r.ded in their growth and at last perish. The coral rock of the inner belt is now dissolved by sea water and scoured out by tidal currents until it gives place to a gradually deepening ship channel, while the outer margin is left as a barrier reef.

In much the same way atolls may be built on any shoal which lies within the zone of coral growth. Such shoals may be produced when volcanic islands are leveled by waves and ocean currents, and when submarine plateaus, ridges, and peaks are built up by various organic agencies, such as molluscous and foraminiferal sh.e.l.l deposits. The reef-building corals, whose eggs are drifted widely over the tropic seas by ocean currents, colonize such submarine foundations wherever the conditions are favorable for their growth. As the reef approaches the surface the corals of the inner area are smothered by silt and starved, and their Submarine Volcanic Peak hard parts are dissolved and scoured away; while those of the circ.u.mference, with abundant food supply, nourish and build the ring of the atoll. Atolls may be produced also by the backward drift of sand from either end of a crescentic coral reef or island, the spits uniting in the quiet water of the lee to inclose a lagoon. In the Maldive Archipelago all gradations between crescent-shaped islets and complete atoll rings have been observed.

In a number of instances where coral reefs have been raised by movements of the earth's crust, the reef formation is found to be a thin veneer built upon a foundation of other deposits. Thus Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, is a volcanic pile rising eleven hundred feet above sea level and fifteen thousand five hundred feet above the bottom of the sea. The summit is a plateau surrounded by a rim of hills of reef formation, which represent the ring of islets of an ancient atoll. Beneath the reef are thick beds of limestone, composed largely of the remains of foraminifers, which cover the lavas and fragraental materials of the old submarine volcano.

Among the ancient sediments which now form the stratified rocks of the land there occur many thin reef deposits, but none are known of the immense thickness which modern reefs are supposed to reach according to the theory of subsidence.

Barrier and fringing reefs are commonly interrupted off the mouths of rivers. Why?

SUMMARY. We have seen that the ocean bed is the goal to which the waste of the rocks of the land at last arrives. Their soluble parts, dissolved by underground waters and carried to the sea by rivers, are largely built up by living creatures into vast sheets of limestone. The less soluble portions--the waste brought in by streams and the waste of the sh.o.r.e--form the muds and sands of continental deltas. All of these sea deposits consolidate and harden, and the coherent rocks of the land are thus reconstructed on the ocean floor. But the destination is not a final one. The stratified rocks of the land are for the most part ancient deposits of the sea, which have been lifted above sea level; and we may believe that the sediments now being laid offsh.o.r.e are the "dust of continents to be," and will some time emerge to form additions to the land. We are now to study the movements of the earth's crust which restore the sediments of the sea to the light of day, and to whose beneficence we owe the habitable lands of the present.

PART II

INTERNAL GEOLOGICAL AGENCIES

CHAPTER IX

MOVEMENTS OF THE EARTH'S CRUST

The geological agencies which we have so far studied--weathering, streams, underground waters, glaciers, winds, and the ocean--all work upon the earth from without, and all are set in motion by an energy external to the earth, namely, the radiant energy of the sun. All, too, have a common tendency to reduce the inequalities of the earth's surface by leveling the lands and strewing their waste beneath the sea.

But despite the unceasing efforts of these external agencies, they have not destroyed the continents, which still rear their broad plains and great plateaus and mountain ranges above the sea.

Either, then, the earth is very young and the agents of denudation have not yet had time to do their work, or they have been opposed successfully by other forces.

We enter now upon a department of our science which treats of forces which work upon the earth from within, and increase the inequalities of its surface. It is they which uplift and recreate the lands which the agents of denudation are continually destroying; it is they which deepen the ocean bed and thus withdraw its waters from the sh.o.r.es. At times also these forces have aided in the destruction of the lands by gradually lowering them and bringing in the sea. Under the action of forces resident within the earth the crust slowly rises or sinks; from time to time it has been folded and broken; while vast quant.i.ties of molten rock have been pressed up into it from beneath and outpoured upon its surface. We shall take up these phenomena in the following chapters, which treat of upheavals and depressions of the crust, foldings and fractures of the crust, earthquakes, volcanoes, the interior conditions of the earth, mineral veins, and metamorphism.

OSCILLATIONS OF THE CRUST

Of the various movements of the crust due to internal agencies we will consider first those called oscillations, which lift or depress large areas so slowly that a long time is needed to produce perceptible changes of level, and which leave the strata in nearly their original horizontal att.i.tude. These movements are most conspicuous along coasts, where they can be referred to the datum plane of sea level; we will therefore take our first ill.u.s.trations from rising and sinking sh.o.r.es.

NEW JERSEY. Along the coasts of New Jersey one may find awash at high tide ancient sh.e.l.l heaps, the remains of tribal feasts of aborigines. Meadows and old forest grounds, with the stumps still standing, are now overflowed by the sea, and fragments of their turf and wood are brought to sh.o.r.e by waves. a.s.suming that the sea level remains constant, it is clear that the New Jersey coast is now gradually sinking. The rate of submergence has been estimated at about two feet per century.

On the other hand, the wide coastal plain of New Jersey is made of stratified sands and clays, which, as their marine fossils show, were outspread beneath the sea. Their present position above sea level proves that the land now subsiding emerged in the recent past.

The coast of New Jersey is an example of the slow and tranquil oscillations of the earth's unstable crust now in progress along many sh.o.r.es. Some are emerging from the sea, some are sinking beneath it; and no part of the land seems to have been exempt from these changes in the past.

EVIDENCES OF CHANGES OF LEVEL. Taking the surface of the sea as a level of reference, we may accept as proofs of relative upheaval whatever is now found in place above sea level and could have been formed only at or beneath it, and as proofs of relative subsidence whatever is now found beneath the sea and could only have been formed above it.

Thus old strand lines with sea cliffs, wave-cut rock benches, and beaches of wave-worn pebbles or sand, are striking proofs of recent emergence to the amount of their present height above tide.

No less conclusive is the presence of sea-laid rocks which we may find in the neighboring quarry or outcrop, although it may have been long ages since they were lifted from the sea to form part of the dry land.

Among common proofs of subsidence are roads and buildings and other works of man, and vegetal growths and deposits, such as forest grounds and peat beds, now submerged beneath the sea. In the deltas of many large rivers, such as the Po, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Mississippi, buried soils prove subsidences of hundreds of feet; and in several cases, as in the Mississippi delta, the depression seems to be now in progress.

Other proofs of the same movement are drowned land forms which are modeled only in open air. Since rivers cannot cut their valleys farther below the baselevel of the sea than the depths of their channels, DROWNED VALLEYS are among the plainest proofs of depression. To this cla.s.s belong Narragansett, Delaware, Chesapeake, Mobile, and San Francis...o...b..ys, and many other similar drowned valleys along the coasts of the United States. Less conspicuous are the SUBMARINE CHANNELS which, as soundings show, extend from the mouths of a number of rivers some distance out to sea. Such is the submerged channel which reaches from New York Bay southeast to the edge of the continental shelf, and which is supposed to have been cut by the Hudson River when this part of the shelf was a coastal plain.

WARPING. In a region undergoing changes of level the rate of movement commonly varies in different parts. Portions of an area may be rising or sinking, while adjacent portions are stationary or moving in the opposite direction. In this way a land surface becomes WARPED. Thus, while Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are now rising from the level of the sea, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton Island are sinking, and the sea now flows over the site of the famous old town of Louisburg destroyed in 1758.

Since the close of the glacial epoch the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador have risen hundreds of feet, but the rate of emergence has not been uniform. The old strand line, which stands at five hundred and seventy-five feet above tide at St. John's, Newfoundland, declines to two hundred and fifty feet near the northern point of Labrador.

THE GREAT LAKES is now under-going perceptible warping. Rivers enter the lakes from the south and west with sluggish currents and deep channels resembling the estuaries of drowned rivers; while those that enter from opposite directions are swift and shallow.

At the western end of Lake Erie are found submerged caves containing stalact.i.tes, and old meadows and forest grounds are now under water. It is thus seen that the water of the lakes is rising along their southwestern sh.o.r.es, while from their north-eastern sh.o.r.es it is being withdrawn. The region of the Great Lakes is therefore warping; it is rising in the northeast as compared with the southwest.

From old bench marks and records of lake levels it has been estimated that the rate of warping amounts to five inches a century for every one hundred miles. It is calculated that the water of Lake Michigan is rising at Chicago at the rate of nine or ten inches per century. The divide at this point between the tributaries of the Mississippi and Lake Michigan is but eight feet above the mean stage of the lake. If the canting of the region continues at its present rate, in a thousand years the waters of the lake will here overflow the divide. In three thousand five hundred years all the lakes except Ontario will discharge by this outlet, via the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, into the Gulf of Mexico. The present outlet by the Niagara River will be left dry, and the divide between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi systems will have shifted from Chicago to the vicinity of Buffalo.

PHYSIOGRAPHIC EFFECTS OF OSCILLATIONS. We have already mentioned several of the most important effects of movements of elevation and depression, such as their effects on rivers, the mantle of waste, and the forms of coasts. Movements of elevation--including uplifts by folding and fracture of the crust to be noticed later-- are the necessary conditions for erosion by whatever agent. They determine the various agencies which are to be chiefly concerned m the wear of any land,--whether streams or glaciers, weathering or the wind,--and the degree of their efficiency. The lands must be uplifted before they can be eroded, and since they must be eroded before their waste can be deposited, movements of elevation are a prerequisite condition for sedimentation also. Subsidence is a necessary condition for deposits of great thickness, such as those of the Great Valley of California and the Indo-Gangetic plain (p.

101), the Mississippi delta (p. 109), and the still more important formations of the continental delta in gradually sinking troughs (p. 183). It is not too much to say that the character and thickness of each formation of the stratified rocks depend primarily on these crustal movements.

Along the Baltic coast of Sweden, bench marks show that the sea is withdrawing from the land at a rate which at the north amounts to between three and four feet per century; Towards the south the rate decreases. South of Stockholm, until recent years, the sea has gained upon the land, and here in several seaboard towns streets by the sh.o.r.e are still submerged. The rate of oscillation increases also from the coast inland. On the other hand, along the German coast of the Baltic the only historic fluctuations of sea level are those which may be accounted for by variations due to changes in rainfall. In 1730 Celsius explained the changes of level of the Swedish coast as due to a lowering of the Baltic instead of to an elevation of the land. Are the facts just stated consistent with his theory?

At the little town of Tadousac--where the Saguenay River empties into the St. Lawrence--there are terraces of old sea beaches, some almost as fresh as recent railway fills, the highest standing two hundred and thirty feet above the river. Here the Saguenay is eight hundred and forty feet in depth, and the tide ebbs and flows far up its stream. Was its channel cut to this depth by the river when the land was at its present height? What oscillations are here recorded, and to what amount?

A few miles north of Naples, Italy, the ruins of an ancient Roman temple lie by the edge of the sea, on a narrow plain which is overlooked in the rear by an old sea cliff (Fig. 166). Three marble pillars are still standing. For eleven feet above their bases these columns are uninjured, for to this height they were protected by an acc.u.mulation of volcanic ashes; but from eleven to nineteen feet they are closely pitted with the holes of boring marine mollusks. From these facts trace the history of the oscillations of the region.

FOLDINGS OF THE CRUST

The oscillations which we have just described leave the strata not far from their original horizontal att.i.tude. Figure 167 represents a region in which movements of a very different nature have taken place. Here, on either side of the valley V, we find outcrops of layers tilted at high angles. Sections along the ridge r show that it is composed of layers which slant inward from either side. In places the outcropping strata stand nearly on edge, and on the right of the valley they are quite overturned; a shale SH has come to overlie a limestone LM although the shale is the older rock, whose original position was beneath the limestone.

It is not reasonable to suppose that these rocks were deposited in the att.i.tude in which we find them now; we must believe that, like other stratified rocks, they were outspread in nearly level sheets upon the ocean floor. Since that time they must have been deformed. Layers of solid rock several miles in thickness have been crumpled and folded like soft wax in the hand, and a vast denudation has worn away the upper portions of the folds, in part represented in our section by dotted lines.

DIP AND STRIKE. In districts where the strata have been disturbed it is desirable to record their att.i.tude. This is most easily done by taking the angle at which the strata are inclined and the compa.s.s direction in which they slant. It is also convenient to record the direction in which the outcrop of the strata trends across the country.

The inclination of a bed of rocks to the horizon is its DIP. The amount of the dip is the angle made with a horizontal plane. The dip of a horizontal layer is zero, and that of a vertical layer is 90 degrees. The direction of the dip is taken with the compa.s.s.

Thus a geologist's notebook in describing the att.i.tude of outcropping strata contains many such entries as these: dip 32 degrees north, or dip 8 degrees south 20 degrees west,--meaning in the latter case that the amount of the dip is 8 degrees and the direction of the dip bears 20 degrees west of south.

The line of intersection of a layer with the horizontal plane is the STRIKE. The strike always runs at right angles to the dip.

Dip and strike may be ill.u.s.trated by a book set aslant on a shelf.

The dip is the acute angle made with the shelf by the side of the book, while the strike is represented by a line running along the book's upper edge. If the dip is north or south, the strike runs east and west.

FOLDED STRUCTURES. An upfold, in which the strata dip away from a line drawn along the crest and called the axis of the fold, is known as an ANTICLINE. A downfold, where the strata dip from either side toward the axis of the trough, is called a SYNCLINE.

There is sometimes seen a downward bend in horizontal or gently inclined strata, by which they descend to a lower level. Such a single flexure is a MONOCLINE.

DEGREES OF FOLDING. Folds vary in degree from broad, low swells, which can hardly be detected, to the most highly contorted and complicated structures. In SYMMETRIC folds the dips of the rocks on each side the axis of the fold are equal. In UNSYMMETRICAL folds one limb is steeper than the other, as in the anticline in Figure 167. In OVERTURNED folds one limb is inclined beyond the perpendicular. FAN FOLDS have been so pinched that the original anticlines are left broader at the top than at the bottom.