the current cycle; and it is to this newly introduced cycle of physiographic
evolution that the deep canyons of the Plateau province are
due. Thus the Virgin river, a northern branch of the Colorado, has
cut a vertical slit, 1000 ft. deep, hardly wider at the top than at the
bottom, in the heavy Triassic sandstones of southern Utah; but the
most famous example is the Grand Canyon (q.v.) of Arizona, eroded
by the Colorado river across the uplifted platform of Carboniferous
limestone.
During the current cycle of erosion, several of the faults, whose scarps had been worn away in the previous cycle, have been brought to light again as topographic features by the removal of the weak strata along one side of the fault line, leaving the harder strata on the other side in relief; such scarps are known as “fault-line scarps,” in distinction from the original “fault scarps.” They are peculiar in having their altitude dependent on the depth of revived erosion, instead of the amount of faulting, and they are sometimes “topographically reversed,” in that the revived scarp overlooks a lowland worn on a weak formation in the upheaved fault-block. Another consequence of revived erosion is seen in the occurrence of great landslides, where the removal of weak (Permian) clays has sapped the face of the Vermilion Cliffs (Triassic sandstone), so that huge slices of the cliff face have slid down and forward a mile or two, all shattered into a confused tumult of forms for a score or more of miles along the cliff base.
Volcanic features occur in abundance in the Plateau province. Some of the high plateaus in the north are capped with remnants of heavy lava flows of early eruption. A group of large volcanoes occurs on the limestone platform south of the Grand Canyon, culminating in Mt San Francisco (12,794 ft.), a moderately dissected cone, and associated with many more recent smaller cones and fresh looking lava flows. Mt Taylor in western New Mexico is of similar age, but here dissection seems to have advanced farther, probably because of the weaker nature of the underlying rocks, with the result of removing the smaller cones and exposing many lava conduits or pipes in the form of volcanic necks or buttes. The Henry Mountains in south-western Utah are peculiar in owing their relief to the doming or blistering up of the plateau strata by the underground intrusion of large bodies or “cisterns” (laccolites) of lava, now more or less exposed by erosion.
The lava plains of the Columbia basin are among the most extensive volcanic outpourings in the world. They cover 200,000 sq. m. or more in south-eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and south-western Idaho, and are known to be 4000 ft. deep in some river gorges. The lava completely buries the pre-existent land forms over most of its extent. The earlier supposition that these vast lava flows came chiefly from fissure eruptions has been made doubtful by the later discovery of flat-sloping volcanic cones from which much lava seems to have been poured out in a very liquid state. Some of the flows are still so young as to preserve their scoriaceous surface; here the “shore-line” of the lava contours evenly around the spurs and enters, bay-like, into the valleys of the enclosing mountains, occasionally isolating an outlying mass. Other parts of the lava flood are much older and have been more or less deformed and eroded. Thus the uplifted, dislocated and dissected lava sheets of the Yellowstone National Park in the Rocky Mountains on the east (about the headwaters of the Snake river) are associated with the older lavas of the Columbian plains.
The Columbia river has entrenched itself in a canyon-like valley around the northern and western side of the lava plains; Snake river has cut a deeper canyon farther south-east where the plains are higher and has disclosed the many lava sheets which build up the plains, occasionally revealing a buried mountain in which the superposed river has cut an even narrower canyon. One of the most remarkable features of this province is seen in the temporary course taken by the Columbia river across the plains, while its canyon was obstructed by Pleistocene glaciers that came from the Cascade Mountains on the north-west. The river followed the temporary course long enough to erode a deep gorge, known as “Grande Coulee,” along part of its length.
The lava plains are treeless and for the most part too dry for agriculture; but they support many cattle and horses. Along parts of their eastern border, where the rainfall is a little increased by the approach of the westerly winds to the Rocky Mountains, there is a belt of very deep, impalpably fine soil, supposed to be a dust deposit brought from the drier parts of the plains farther west; excellent crops of wheat are here raised.
The large province of the Basin ranges, an arid region throughout, even though it reaches the sea in southern California, involves some The Basin Range Province. novel problems in its description. It is characterized by numerous disconnected mountain ranges trending north and south, from 30 to 100 m. in length, the higher ranges reaching altitudes of 8000 or 10,000 ft., separated by broad, intermont desert plains or basins at altitudes varying from sea-level (or a little less) in the south-west, to 4000 or 5000 ft. farther inland. Many of the intermont plains—these chiefly in the north—appear to be heavily aggraded with mountain waste; while others—these chiefly in the south—are rock-floored and thinly veneered with alluvium. The origin of these forms is still in discussion; but the following interpretation is well supported. The ranges are primarily the result of faulting and uplifting of large blocks of the earth's crust. The structure of the region previous to faulting was dependent on long antecedent processes of accumulation and deformation and the surface of the region then was dependent on the amount of erosion suffered in the prefaulting cycle. When the region was broken into fault blocks and the blocks were uplifted and tilted, the back slope of each block was a part of the previously eroded surface and the face of the block was a surface of fracture; the present form of the higher blocks is more or less affected by erosion since faulting, while many of the lower blocks have been buried under the waste of the higher ones. In the north, where dislocations have invaded the field of the horizontal Columbian lavas, as in south-eastern Oregon and north-eastern California, the blocks are monoclinal in structure as well as in attitude; here the amount of dissection is relatively moderate, for some of the fault faces are described as ravined but not yet deeply dissected; hence these dislocations appear to be of recent date. In western Utah and through most of Nevada many of the blocks exhibit deformed structures, involving folds and faults of relatively ancient (Jurassic) date; so ancient that the mountains then formed by the folding were worn down to the lowland stage of old age before the block-faulting occurred. When this old-mountain lowland was broken into blocks and the blocks were tilted, their attitude, but not their structure, was monoclinal; and in this new attitude they have been so maturely re-dissected in the new cycle of erosion upon which they have now entered as to have gained elaborately carved forms in which the initial form of the uplifted blocks can hardly be perceived; yet at least some of them still retain along one side the highly significant feature of a relatively simple base-line, transecting hard and soft structures alike, and thus indicating the faulted margin of a tilted block. Here the less uplifted blocks are now heavily aggraded with waste from the dissected ranges: the waste takes the form of huge alluvial fans, formed chiefly by occasional boulder-bearing floods from the mountains; each fan heads in a ravine at the mountain base, and becomes laterally confluent with adjacent fans as it stretches several miles forward, with decreasing slope and increasing fineness of material.
In the southern part of the Basin Range province the ranges are well dissected and some of the intermont depressions have rock floors with gentle, centripetal slopes; hence it is suggested that the time since the last dislocation in this part of the province is relatively remote; that erosion in the current cycle has here advanced much farther than in the central or northern parts of the province; and that, either by outwash to the sea or by exportation of wind-borne dust, the depressions—perhaps aggraded for a time in the earlier stages of the cycle—have now been so deeply worn down as to degrade the lower and weaker parts of the tilted blocks to an evenly sloping surface, leaving the higher and harder parts still in relief as residual ranges. If this be true, the southern district will furnish a good illustration of an advanced stage of the cycle of arid erosion, in which the exportation of waste from enclosed depressions by the wind has played an important part. In such case the washing of the centripetal slopes of the depressions by occasional “sheet-floods” (widespreading sheets of turbid running water, supplied by heavy short-lived rains) has been efficient in keeping the rock floor at even grade toward a central basin, where the finest waste is collected while waiting to be removed by the winds.
Only a small part of the Basin Range province is drained to the sea. A few intermont areas in the north-west part of the province have outlet westward by Klamath river through the Cascade range and by Pitt river (upper part of the Sacramento) through the Sierra Nevada: a few basins in the south-east have outlet by the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico; a much larger but still narrow medial area is drained south-westward by the Colorado to the head of the Gulf of California, where this large and very turbid river has formed an extensive delta, north of which the former head of the gulf is now cut off from the sea and laid bare by evaporation as a plain below sea-level. It is here that an irrigation project, involving the diversion of some of the river water to the low plain, led to disaster in 1904, when the flooded river washed away the canal gates at the intake and overflowed the plain, drowning the newly established farms, compelling a railway to shift its track, and forming a lake (Salton Sea) which would require years of evaporation to remove (see Colorado River). Many streams descend from the ravines only to wither away on the desert basin floors before uniting in a trunk river along the axis of a depression; others succeed in uniting in the winter season, when evaporation is much reduced, and then their trunk flows for a few score miles, only to disappear by “sinking” (evaporating) farther on. A few of the large streams may, when in flood, spread out in a temporary shallow sheet on a dead level of clay, or playa, in a basin centre, but the sheet of water vanishes in the warm season and the stream shrinks far up its course, the absolutely barren clay floor of the playa, impassable when wet, becomes firm enough for crossing when dry. One of the south-western basins, with its floor below sea-level, has a plain of salt in its centre. A few of the basins are occupied by lakes without outlet, of which Great Salt Lake (q.v.), in north-west Utah, is the largest. Several smaller lakes occur in the basins of western Nevada, next east of the Sierra Nevada. During Pleistocene times all these lacustrine basins were occupied by lakes of much greater depth and larger size; the outlines of the eastern (Lake Bonneville) and the western (Lake Lahontan) water bodies are well recorded by shore lines
