Dislocations and river valleys. Before geologists had proved that rivers can by their own unaided efforts cut deep canyons, it was common to consider any narrow gorge as a gaping fissure of the crust. This crude view has long since been set aside. A map of the plateaus of northern Arizona shows how independent of the immense faults of the region is the course of the Colorado River. In the Alps the tunnels on the Saint Gotthard railway pass six times beneath the gorge of the Reuss, but at no point do the rocks show the slightest trace of a fault.
Fig. 192. Fault crossing Valley in Japan
Rate of dislocation. So far as human experience goes, the earth movements which we have just studied, some of which have produced deep-sunk valleys and lofty mountain ranges, and faults whose throw is to be measured in thousands of feet, are slow and gradual. They are not accomplished by a single paroxysmal effort, but by slow creep and a series of slight slips continued for vast lengths of time.
In the Aspen mining district in Colorado faulting is now going on at a comparatively rapid rate. Although no sudden slips take place, the creep of the rock along certain planes of faulting gradually bends out of shape the square-set timbers in horizontal drifts and has closed some vertical shafts by shifting the upper portion across the lower. Along one of the faults of this region it is estimated that there has been a movement of at least four hundred feet since the Glacial epoch. More conspicuous are the instances of active faulting by means of sudden slips. In 1891 there occurred along an old fault plane in Japan a slip which produced an earth rent traced for fifty miles ([Fig. 192]). The country on one side was depressed in places twenty feet below that on the other, and also shifted as much as thirteen feet horizontally in the direction of the fault line.
In 1872 a slip occurred for forty miles on the great line of dislocation which runs along the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In the Owens valley, California, the throw amounted to twenty-five feet in places, with a horizontal movement along the fault line of as much as eighteen feet. Both this slip and that in Japan just mentioned caused severe earthquakes.
For the sake of clearness we have described oscillations, foldings, and fractures of the crust as separate processes, each giving rise to its own peculiar surface features, but in nature earth movements are by no means so simple,—they are often implicated with one another: folds pass into faults; in a deformed region certain rocks have bent, while others under the same strain, but under different conditions of plasticity and load, have broken; folded mountains have been worn to their roots, and the peneplains to which they have been denuded have been upwarped to mountain height and afterwards dissected,—as in the case of the Allegheny ridges, the southern Carpathians, and other ranges, —or, as in the case of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, have been broken and uplifted as mountains of fracture.
Draw the following diagrams, being careful to show the direction in which the faulted blocks have moved, by the position of the two parts of some well-defined layer of limestone, sandstone, or shale, which occurs on each side of the fault plane, as in [Figure 184].