11 These considerations may have value in showing that the time in which the lateral crushing of the Appalachians was accomplished was not so brief as is stated by Reade in a recent article in the American Geologist, iii, 1889, 106.
9. Newark deposition.—After the great Paleozoic and Perm-Triassic erosions thus indicated, when the southeastern area of ancient mountains had been well worn down and the Permian folds of the central district had acquired a well developed drainage, there appeared an opportunity for local deposition in the slow depression of a northeast-southwest belt of the deeply wasted land, across the southeastern part of the State; and into this trough-like depression, the waste from the adjacent areas on either side was carried, building the Newark formation. This may be referred to as the Newark or Trias-Jurassic period of deposition. The volume of this formation is unknown, as its thickness and original area are still undetermined; but it is pretty surely of many thousand feet in vertical measure, and its original area may have been easily a fifth or a quarter in excess of its present area, if not larger yet. So great a local accumulation seems to indicate that while the belt of deposition was sinking, the adjacent areas were rising, in order to furnish a continual supply of material; the occurrence of heavy conglomerates along the margins of the Newark formation confirms this supposition, and the heavy breccias near Reading indicate the occurrence of a strong topography and a strong transporting agent to the northwest of this part of the Newark belt. It will be necessary, when the development of the ancestors of our present rivers is taken up, to consider the effects of the depression that determined the locus of Newark deposition and of the adjacent elevation that maintained a supply of material.
10. Jurassic tilting.—Newark deposition was stopped by a gradual reversal of the conditions that introduced it. The depression of the Newark belt was after a time reversed into elevation, accompanied by a peculiar tilting, and again the waste of the region was carried away to some unknown resting place. This disturbance, which may be regarded as a revival of the Permian activity, culminated in Jurassic, or at least in post-Newark time, and resulted in the production of the singular monoclinal attitude of the formation; and as far as I can correlate it with the accompanying change in the underlying structures, it involved there an over-pushing of the closed folds of the Archean and Paleozoic rocks. This is illustrated in figs. 2 and 3, in which the original and disturbed attitudes of the Newark and the underlying formations are roughly shown, the over-pushing of the fundamental folds causing the monoclinal and probably faulted structure in the overlying beds.12 If this be true, we might suspect that the unsymmetrical attitude of the Appalachian folds, noted by Rogers as a characteristic of the range, is a feature that was intensified if not originated in Jurassic and not in Permian time.
12 Amer. Journ. Science, xxxii, 1886, 342; and Seventh Ann. Rept. U. S. Geol. Survey, 1888, 486.
| FIG. 2. | FIG. 3. |
It is not to be supposed that the Jurassic deformation was limited to the area of the Newark beds; it may have extended some way on either side; but it presumably faded out at no great distance, for it has not been detected in the history of the Atlantic and Mississippi regions remote from the Newark belt. In the district of the central folds of Pennsylvania, with which we are particularly concerned, this deformation was probably expressed in a further folding and over-pushing of the already partly folded beds, with rapidly decreasing effect to the northwest; and perhaps also by slip-faults, which at the surface of the ground nearly followed the bedding planes: but this is evidently hypothetical to a high degree. The essential point for our subsequent consideration is that the Jurassic deformation was probably accompanied by a moderate elevation, for it allowed the erosion of the Newark beds and of laterally adjacent areas as well.
11. Jura-Cretaceous denudation.—In consequence of this elevation, a new cycle of erosion was entered upon, which I shall call the Jura-Cretaceous cycle. It allowed the accomplishment of a vast work, which ended in the production of a general lowland of denudation, a wide area of faint relief, whose elevated remnants are now to be seen in the even ridge-crests that so strongly characterize the central district, as well as in certain other even uplands, now etched by the erosion of a later cycle of destructive work. I shall not here take space for the deliberate statement of the argument leading to this end, but its elements are as follows: the extraordinarily persistent accordance among the crest-line altitudes of many Medina and Carboniferous ridges in the central district; the generally corresponding elevation of the western plateau surface, itself a surface of erosion, but now trenched by relatively deep and narrow valleys; the generally uniform and consistent altitude of the uplands in the crystalline highlands of northern New Jersey and in the South Mountains of Pennsylvania; and the extension of the same general surface, descending slowly eastward, over the even crest-lines of the Newark trap ridges. Besides the evidence of less continental elevation thus deduced from the topography, it may be noted that a lower stand of the land in Cretaceous time than now is indicated by the erosion that the Cretaceous beds have suffered in consequence of the elevation that followed their deposition. The Cretaceous transgression in the western states doubtless bears on the problem also. Finally it may be fairly urged that it is more accordant with what is known about old mountains in general to suppose that their mass has stood at different attitudes with respect to base level during their long period of denudation than to suppose that they have held one attitude through all the time since their deformation.