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 Alleghany 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.
1. A normal fault with a hade of 15 degrees, the original fault
scarp remaining.
2. A normal fault with a hade of 50 degrees, the original fault
scarp worn away, showing cliffs caused by harder strata on the
downthrow side.
3. A thrust fault with a hade of 30 degrees, showing cliffs due to
harder strata outcropping on the downthrow.
4. A thrust fault with a hade of 80 degrees, with surface
baseleveled.
5. In a region of normal faults a coal mine is being worked along
the seam of coal AB (Fig. 193). At B it is found broken by a fault
f which hades toward A. To find the seam again, should you advise
tunneling up or down from B?
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