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 shores. 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 class belong Narragansett, Delaware, Chesapeake, Mobile, and San Francisco bays, 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 ([Fig. 164]).