Geological Observations on South America

by Charles Darwin

AA. The bottom of the valley, believed to be 100 feet above the sea: it is continuously united with the lowest plain A of Figure 9.

B. This terrace higher up the valley expands considerably; seaward it is soon lost, its escarpment being united with that of C: it is not developed at all on the south side of the valley.

C. This terrace, like the last, is considerably expanded higher up the valley. These two terraces apparently correspond with B and C of Figure 9.

D is not well developed in the line of this section; but seaward it expands into a plain: it is not present on the south side of the valley; but it is met with, as stated under the former section, a little south of the town.

E is well developed on the south side, but absent on the north side of the valley: though not continuously united with E of Figure 9, it apparently corresponds with it.

F. This is the surface-plain, and is continuously united with that which stretches like a fringe along the coast. In ascending the valley it gradually becomes narrower, and is at last, at the distance of about ten miles from the sea, reduced to a row of flat-topped patches on the sides of the mountains. None of the lower terraces extend so far up the valley.)

We come now to the terraces on the opposite sides of the east and west valley of Coquimbo: the section in Figure 10 is taken in a north and south line across the valley at a point about three miles from the sea. The valley measured from the edges of the escarpments of the upper plain FF is about a mile in width; but from the bases of the bounding mountains it is from three to four miles wide. The terraces marked with an interrogative do not exist on that side of the valley, but are introduced merely to render the diagram more intelligible.

These five terraces are formed of shingle and sand; three of them, as marked by Captain B. Hall (namely, B, C, and F), are much more conspicuous than the others. From the marine remains copiously strewed at the mouth of the valley on the lower terraces, and southward of the town on the upper one, they are, as before remarked, undoubtedly of marine origin; but within the valley, and this fact well deserves notice, at a distance of from only a mile and a half to three or four miles from the sea, I could not find even a fragment of a shell.

ON THE INCLINATION OF THE TERRACES OF COQUIMBO, AND ON THE UPPER AND BASAL EDGES OF THEIR ESCARPMENTS NOT BEING HORIZONTAL.

The surfaces of these terraces slope in a slight degree, as shown by the sections in Figures 9 and 10 taken conjointly, both towards the centre of the valley, and seawards towards its mouth. This double or diagonal inclination, which is not the same in the several terraces, is, as we shall immediately see, of simple explanation. There are, however, some other points which at first appear by no means obvious,—namely, first, that each terrace, taken in its whole breadth from the summit-edge of one escarpment to the base of that above it, and followed up the valley, is not horizontal; nor have the several terraces, when followed up the valley, all the same inclination; thus I found the terraces C, E, and F, measured at a point about two miles from the mouth of the valley, stood severally between fifty-six to seventy-seven feet higher than at the mouth. Again, if we look to any one line of cliff or escarpment, neither its summit-edge nor its base is horizontal. On the theory of the terraces having been formed during a slow and equable rise of the land, with as many intervals of rest as there are escarpments, it appears at first very surprising that horizontal lines of some kind should not have been left on the land.