The Elements of Geology - William Harmon Norton (best beach reads TXT) 📗

are either skirted with coral reefs or are themselves of coral formation.

CONDITIONS OF CORAL GROWTH. Reef-building corals cannot live except in clear salt water less, as a rule, than one hundred and fifty feet in depth, with a winter temperature not lower than 68 degrees F. An important condition also is an abundant food supply, and this is best secured in the path of the warm oceanic currents.

Coral reefs may be grouped in three classes,—fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and atolls.

FRINGING REEFS. These take their name from the fact that they are attached as narrow fringes to the shore. An example is the reef which forms a selvage about a mile wide along the northeastern coast of Cuba. The outer margin, indicated by the line of white surf, where the corals are in vigorous growth, rises from about forty feet of water. Between this and the shore lies a stretch of shoal across which one can wade at low water, composed of coral sand with here and there a clump of growing coral.

BARRIER REEFS. Reefs separated from the shore by a ship channel of quiet water, often several miles in width and sometimes as much as three hundred feet in depth, are known as barrier reefs. The seaward face rises abruptly from water too deep for coral growth. Low islands are cast up by the waves upon the reef, and inlets give place for the ebb and flow of the tides. Along the west coast of the island of New Caledonia a barrier reef extends for four hundred miles, and for a length of many leagues seldom approaches within eight miles of the shore.

ATOLLS. These are ring-shaped or irregular coral islands, or island-studded reefs, inclosing a central lagoon. The narrow zone of land, like the rim of a great bowl sunken to the water's edge, rises hardly more than twenty feet at most above the sea, and is covered with a forest of trees such as the cocoanut, whose seeds can be drifted to it uninjured from long distances. The white beach of coral sand leads down to the growing reef, on whose outer margin the surf is constantly breaking. The sea face of the reef falls off abruptly, often to depths of thousands of feet, while the lagoon varies in depth from a few feet to one hundred and fifty or two hundred, and exceptionally measures as much as three hundred and fifty feet.

THEORIES OF CORAL REEFS. Fringing reefs require no explanation, since the depth of water about them is not greater than that at which coral can grow; but barrier reefs and atolls, which may rise from depths too great for coral growth demand a theory of their origin.

Darwin's theory holds that barrier reefs and atolls are formed from fringing reefs by SUBSIDENCE. The rate of sinking cannot be greater than that of the upbuilding of the reef, since otherwise the corals would be carried below their depth and drowned. The process is illustrated in Figure 161, where v represents a volcanic island in mid ocean undergoing slow depression, and ss the sea level before the sinking began, when the island was surrounded by a fringing reef. As the island slowly sinks, the reef builds up with equal pace. It rears its seaward face more steep than the island slope, and thus the intervening space between the sinking, narrowing land and the outer margin of the reef constantly widens. In this intervening space the corals are more or less smothered with silt from the outer reef and from the land, and are also deprived in large measure of the needful supply of food and oxygen by the vigorous growth of the corals on the outer rim. The outer rim thus becomes a barrier reef and the inner belt of retarded growth is deepened by subsidence to a ship channel, s's' representing sea level at this time. The final stage, where the island has been carried completely beneath the sea and overgrown by the contracting reef, whose outer ring now forms an atoll, is represented by s"s".

In very many instances, however, atolls and barrier reefs may be explained without subsidence. Thus a barrier reef may be formed by the seaward growth of a fringing reef upon the talus of its sea face. In Figure 162 f is a fringing reef whose outer wall rises from about one hundred and fifty feet, the lower limit of the reef-building species. At the foot of this submarine cliff a talus of fallen blocks t accumulates, and as it reaches the zone of coral growth becomes the foundation on which the reef is steadily extended seaward. As the reef widens, the polyps of the circumference flourish, while those of the inner belt are retarded in their growth and at last perish. The coral rock of the inner belt is now dissolved by sea water and scoured out by tidal currents until it gives place to a gradually deepening ship channel, while the outer margin is left as a barrier reef.

In much the same way atolls may be built on any shoal which lies within the zone of coral growth. Such shoals may be produced when volcanic islands are leveled by waves and ocean currents, and when submarine plateaus, ridges, and peaks are built up by various organic agencies, such as molluscous and foraminiferal shell deposits. The reef-building corals, whose eggs are drifted widely over the tropic seas by ocean currents, colonize such submarine foundations wherever the conditions are favorable for their growth. As the reef approaches the surface the corals of the inner area are smothered by silt and starved, and their Submarine Volcanic Peak hard parts are dissolved and scoured away; while those of the circumference, with abundant food supply, nourish and build the ring of the atoll. Atolls may be produced also by the backward drift of sand from either end of a crescentic coral reef or island, the spits uniting in the quiet water of the lee to inclose a lagoon. In the Maldive Archipelago all gradations between crescent-shaped islets and complete atoll rings have been observed.

In a number of instances where coral reefs have been raised by movements of the earth's crust, the reef formation is found to be a thin veneer built upon a foundation of other deposits. Thus Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, is a volcanic pile rising eleven hundred feet above sea level and fifteen thousand five hundred feet above the bottom of the sea. The summit is a plateau surrounded by a rim of hills of reef formation, which represent the ring of islets of an ancient atoll. Beneath the reef are thick beds of limestone, composed largely of the remains of foraminifers, which cover the lavas and fragraental materials of the old submarine volcano.

Among the ancient sediments which now form the stratified rocks of the land there occur many thin reef deposits, but none are known of the immense thickness which modern reefs are supposed to reach according to the theory of subsidence.

Barrier and fringing reefs are commonly interrupted off the mouths of rivers. Why?

SUMMARY. We have seen that the ocean bed is the goal to which the waste of the rocks of the land at last arrives. Their soluble parts, dissolved by underground waters and carried to the sea by rivers, are largely built up by living creatures into vast sheets of limestone. The less soluble portions—the waste brought in by streams and the waste of the shore—form the muds and sands of continental deltas. All of these sea deposits consolidate and harden, and the coherent rocks of the land are thus reconstructed on the ocean floor. But the destination is not a final one. The stratified rocks of the land are for the most part ancient deposits of the sea, which have been lifted above sea level; and we may believe that the sediments now being laid offshore are the "dust of continents to be," and will some time emerge to form additions to the land. We are now to study the movements of the earth's crust which restore the sediments of the sea to the light of day, and to whose beneficence we owe the habitable lands of the present.

PART II INTERNAL GEOLOGICAL AGENCIES CHAPTER IX MOVEMENTS OF THE EARTH'S CRUST

The geological agencies which we have so far studied—weathering, streams, underground waters, glaciers, winds, and the ocean—all work upon the earth from without, and all are set in motion by an energy external to the earth, namely, the radiant energy of the sun. All, too, have a common tendency to reduce the inequalities of the earth's surface by leveling the lands and strewing their waste beneath the sea.

But despite the unceasing efforts of these external agencies, they have not destroyed the continents, which still rear their broad plains and great plateaus and mountain ranges above the sea. Either, then, the earth is very young and the agents of denudation have not yet had time to do their work, or they have been opposed successfully by other forces.

We enter now upon a department of our science which treats of forces which work upon the earth from within, and increase the inequalities of its surface. It is they which uplift and recreate the lands which the agents of denudation are continually destroying; it is they which deepen the ocean bed and thus withdraw its waters from the shores. At times also these forces have aided in the destruction of the lands by gradually lowering them and bringing in the sea. Under the action of forces resident within the earth the crust slowly rises or sinks; from time to time it has been folded and broken; while vast quantities of molten rock have been pressed up into it from beneath and outpoured upon its surface. We shall take up these phenomena in the following chapters, which treat of upheavals and depressions of the crust, foldings and fractures of the crust, earthquakes, volcanoes, the interior conditions of the earth, mineral veins, and metamorphism.

OSCILLATIONS OF THE CRUST

Of the various movements of the crust due to internal agencies we will consider first those called oscillations, which lift or depress large areas so slowly that a long time is needed to produce perceptible changes of level, and which leave the strata in nearly their original horizontal attitude. These movements are most conspicuous along coasts, where they can be referred to the datum plane of sea level; we will therefore take our first illustrations from rising and sinking shores.

NEW JERSEY. Along the coasts of New Jersey one may find awash at high tide ancient shell heaps, the remains of tribal feasts of aborigines. Meadows and old forest grounds, with the stumps still standing, are now overflowed by the sea, and fragments of their turf and wood are brought to shore by waves. Assuming that the sea level remains constant, it is clear that the New Jersey coast is now gradually sinking. The rate of submergence has been estimated at about two feet per century.

On the other hand, the wide coastal plain of New Jersey is made of stratified sands and clays, which, as their marine fossils show, were outspread beneath the sea. Their present position above sea level proves that the land now subsiding emerged in the recent past.

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