The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain, Volume 1 (of 2)Geikie, Archibald
History
The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain, Volume 1 (of 2)
Geikie, Archibald
Volcanoes -- Great Britain
The evidence adduced in favour of this great break appears to me to be
threefold. In the first place, the quartzite contains fragments of the
volcanic rocks. I do not think much stress can be laid on this fact.
When I visited the ground, what struck me most in the composition of
the quartzite was its singularly pure quartzose character, and the
comparative scarcity of felsite-pebbles in it. Any deposit laid down
conformably upon the top of the breccias and tuffs might obviously
contain some of these materials, while, if laid down unconformably, it
might reasonably be expected to be full of them. In the second place,
this quartzite is alleged to pass transgressively across the edges
of successive sheets of the volcanic group, and thus to have a quite
discordant dip and strike. I failed to find satisfactory evidence of
this unconformability in the northern part of the district. But in
the Caer Caradoc area the quartzite does appear to steal across the
outcrops of the older rocks, which plunge at nearly right angles in an
opposite direction. In the third place, the felsitic volcanic group is
believed by Professor Lapworth to pass upwards into the Longmynd rocks.
Obviously, if this group lies at the very bottom of the vast Longmynd
series, the discordance between it and the quartzite must be enormous,
and the date of the volcanic eruptions must be placed vastly farther
back in geological antiquity. Though the evidence does not seem to me
to amount to clear proof, I am disposed, in the meantime, to accept it
as affording the most probable solution of the difficulties presented
by the structure of the ground.
The sequence of the rocks around Caer Caradoc is partly concealed by
surface accumulations, but if these could be cleared away the structure
of the ground would be, according to Messrs. Lapworth and Watts, as
shown in Fig. 39.[75]
[Footnote 75: _Proc. Geol. Assoc._ vol. xiii. (1894), pp. 314, 315.]
If, then, this volcanic group underlies the whole of the Longmynd
series, and if, as it now appears, that series is older than the
_Olenellus_-zone of the Lower Cambrian rocks, we can hardly include the
volcanic rocks of the Wrekin and Caer Caradoc in the Cambrian system.
They must belong to a still older geological formation, and I think we
cannot do better than adopt for them Dr. Callaway's name, Uriconian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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