The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. II., No. 2, May, 1890Various
Science
The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. II., No. 2, May, 1890
Various
Geography -- Periodicals
adolescent rivers have the best opportunity to persist across a belt of
rising or writhing country,[2] because a great deformation would be
required to throw them from their courses. Small streams or large ones
of faint slope in an open low country are more easily deflected. From
the typical antecedent river, the series may be continued by examples
in which even the larger streams are less or more ponded or deflected
by the deformation, until at the end of the series there is a complete
extinction of the antecedent drainage and the establishment of an
entirely original consequent drainage. The perfectly typical antecedent
river, in the middle of this series, is certainly of rare occurrence,
and is perhaps unknown.
[Footnote 1: Colorado river of the West, 163.]
[Footnote 2: Stur's expression "Gebirgshub oder Gebirgschub" suggested
to me the terms here employed.]
Consequent streams, whose course is taken on a relatively thin,
unconformably overlying mass, for a time preserve their initial
courses, even though they may be quite out of accord with the
underlying structures on which they have descended. Such streams were
first recognized by Marvine, and afterwards named "superimposed,"
"inherited" or "epigenetic" by various authors. A full collection of
examples of this class should begin with streams that depart from true
consequent courses only locally, where they have discovered a small
portion of the underlying formation, like the Merrimack at Manchester
and other water-power towns of New Hampshire, where the stream has sunk
upon rocky ledges beneath the surface drift and sands; or like the
Mississippi and other rivers in Minnesota which have in places cut
through the drift sheet to the underlying crystallines. The series
would conclude with streams that have stripped off the cover on which
they were consequent, and have thus become superimposed on the
underlying formation in their whole length.
There is a curious intermediate type of drainage lately recognized by
McGee in the southern states, a superimposed drainage that is not
inconsequent upon the buried surface beneath the unconformably
overlying surface layer. It occurs in regions where a well-marked
drainage had been established; a brief submergence then allowed the
deposition of a relatively thin mask of sediments; an elevation brought
the masked surface up again, and as it rose, the streams took
possession of lines essentially identical with the courses of their
ancestors, because the mask of newer deposits had not extinguished the
antecedent topography. McGee proposes to call such streams
"resurrected."
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