WARPING AND STREAM DEPOSITION

Most of these rocks of marine origin lie at considerable depth beneath the land surface, concealed by an overlying thick, layered sequence of rocks laid down by streams, wind, and glaciers. Nevertheless, their geologic character, position, and form are exceptionally well known from information gained from thousands of wells that have been drilled for oil. The initial, nearly horizontal position of the layers of rock beneath the Interior Plains has been little disturbed except where mountains like the Black Hills were uplifted about 70 million years ago. At those places, which are all in the northern and southern parts of the Great Plains, the sedimentary layers have been warped up and locally broken by the rise of hot molten rock from depth. Elsewhere in the Interior Plains, however, earth forces of about the same period caused only a reemphasis of gentle undulations in the Earth’s crust.

These undulations affected both the older basement rocks and the overlying sedimentary rocks, and they take the form of gentle basins and arches that in some places span several States. (See sketch map, [figure 7].) A series of narrow basins lies along the mountain front on the west side of the Great Plains. A broad, discontinuous arch extends southwest from the Superior Upland to the Rocky Mountain front to form a buried divide that separates the large Williston basin on the north from the Anadarko basin to the south.

While the flat-lying layers of the Interior Plains were being only gently warped, vastly different earth movements were taking place farther west, in the area of the present Rocky Mountains. Along a relatively narrow north-trending belt, extending from Mexico to Alaska, the land was being uplifted at a great rate. The layers of sedimentary rock deposited in the inland sea were stripped from the crest of the rising mountainous belt by erosion and transported to its flanks as the gravel, sand, and mud of streams and rivers. This transported sediment was deposited on the plains to form the rocks of the Cretaceous Hell Creek, Lance, Laramie, Vermejo, and Raton Formations. Vegetation thrived on this alluvial plain, and thick accumulations of woody debris were buried to ultimately become coal. This lush vegetation provided ample food for the hordes of three-horned dinosaurs (Triceratops) that roamed these plains. Their fossilized remains are found from Canada to New Mexico.

Figure 5.—Geologic time chart and the progression of life forms. Note Cretaceous Triceratops, Oligocene Titanotheres, and Miocene Moropus.

[[This map in a higher resolution]]

GEOLOGIC TIME
The Age of the Earth

The Earth is very old—4.5 billion years or more according to recent estimates. Most of the evidence for an ancient Earth is contained in the rocks that form the Earth’s crust. The rock layers themselves—like pages in a long and complicated history—record the surface-shaping events of the past, and buried within them are traces of life—the plants and animals that evolved from organic structures that existed perhaps 3 billion years ago.

Also contained in rocks once molten are radioactive elements whose isotopes provide Earth scientists with an atomic clock. Within these rocks, “parent” isotopes decay at a predictable rate to form “daughter” isotopes. By determining the relative amounts of parent and daughter isotopes, the age of these rocks can be calculated.

Thus, the results of studies of rock layers (stratigraphy), and of fossils (paleontology), coupled with the ages of certain rocks as measured by atomic clocks (geochronology), attest to a very old Earth!

Figure 6.—Generalized paleogeographic map of the United States in Late Cretaceous time (65 to 80 million years ago), when most of the Great Plains was beneath the sea.

Figure 7.—Structural setting of the Great Plains. Williston basin and Anadarko basin are separated by a midcontinental arch.

Table 1.—Generalized chart of rocks of the Great Plains

Geologic age
Millions of years ago 		Missouri Plateau—Black Hills High Plains—Plains Border—Colorado Piedmont Pecos Valley—Edwards Plateau—Central Texas
Quaternary
Pleistocene Glacial deposits, alluvium, and terrace deposits Alluvium, sand dunes, and loess Piedmont, terrace, and bolson deposits
2 erosional surface
Tertiary
Pliocene EROSION
5 Flaxville Gravel and Ogallala Formation Ogallala formation
Miocene Arikaree Formation Arikaree Formation
22-24 erosional surface
Oligocene White River Group White River Group Mostly missing because of erosion or nondeposition
37-38 erosional surface
Eocene Wasatch and Golden Valley Formations
53-54 Dawson Arkose
Paleocene Fort Union Formation Denver, Poison Canyon, and Raton Formations
65
Cretaceous Hell Creek and Lance Formations Vermejo and Laramie Formations
Fox Hills Sandstone Trinidad and Fox Hills Sandstones
Shales, sandstones, and limestones deposited in Late Cretaceous sea
Dakota Sandstone and Lakota Formation Dakota Sandstone
Glen Rose and Edwards Limestones
136
Jurassic Sundance Formation, Ellis Group, and Unkpapa Sandstone Morrison Formation Jurassic rocks not present
190-195
Triassic Dominantly red rocks
225
PALEOZOIC Paleozoic rocks, undivided
570
PRECAMBRIAN Precambrian rocks, undivided

As the mountains continued to rise, the eroding streams cut into the old core rocks of the mountains, and that debris too was carried to the flanks and onto the adjoining plains. The mountainous belt continued to rise intermittently, and volcanoes began to appear about 50 million years ago. Together, the mountains and volcanoes provided huge quantities of sediment, which the streams transported to the plains and deposited. The areas nearest the mountains were covered by sediments of Late Cretaceous and Paleocene age ([table 1])—the Poison Canyon Formation to the south, the Dawson and Denver Formations in the Denver area, and the Fort Union Formation to the north ([fig. 8]). Vegetation continued to flourish, especially in the northern part of the Great Plains, and was buried to form the thick lignite and subbituminous coal beds of the Fort Union Formation ([fig. 9]). The earliest mammals, most of whose remains come from the Paleocene Fort Union Formation, have few modern survivors.

Beginning about 45 million years ago, in Eocene time, there was a long period of stability lasting perhaps 10 million years, when there was little uplift of the mountains and, therefore, little deposition on the plains. A widespread and strongly developed soil formed over much of the Great Plains during this period of stability. With renewed uplift and volcanism in the mountains at the end of this period, great quantities of sediment again were carried to the plains by streams and spread over the northern Great Plains and southeastward to the arch or divide separating the Williston and Anadarko basins ([fig. 8]). Those sediments form the White River Group, in which the South Dakota Badlands are carved. In addition to the Titanotheres, huge beasts with large, long horns on their snouts who lived only during the Oligocene (37 to 22 million years ago), vast herds of camels, rhinoceroses, horses, and tapirs—animals now found native only on other continents—grazed those Oligocene semiarid grassland plains.

Figure 8.—Progressive southeastward expansion of areas covered by Paleocene, Oligocene, and Miocene-Pliocene sedimentary deposits.

Powder River basin Denver basin Raton basin PLAINS Margin of Oligocene deposition Margin of Miocene-Pliocene deposition

Figure 9.—Big Horn coal strip mine in Fort Union Formation at Acme, Wyo. Photograph by F. W. Osterwald, U.S. Geological Survey.

Sometime between 20 and 30 million years ago the streams began depositing sand and gravel beyond the divide, and, for another 10 million years or more, stream sediments of the Arikaree and Ogallala Formations spread over the entire Great Plains from Canada to Texas, except where mountainous areas such as the Black Hills stood above the plains. Between 5 and 10 million years ago, then, the entire Great Plains was an eastward-sloping depositional plain surmounted only by a few mountain masses. Horses, camels, rhinoceroses, and a strange horselike creature with clawed feet (called Moropus) lived on this plain.