Hugh Walpole - "Jeremy"

Paul Bourget - "Cosmopolis, v2"

Louisa May Alcott - "Jack and Jill"

John Lord - "The Old Roman World"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Elements of Geology

W >> William Harmon Norton >> The Elements of Geology




The shape and size of these grains and the relative proportion of
grains of the softer minerals which still remain give a rough
measure of the distance in space and time which they have traveled
from their source. The sand of many beaches, derived from the
rocks of adjacent cliffs or brought in by torrential streams from
neighboring highlands, is dark with grains of a number of minerals
softer than quartz. The white sand of other beaches, as those of
the east coast of Florida, is almost wholly composed of quartz
grains; for in its long travel down the Atlantic coast the weaker
minerals have been worn to powder and the hardest alone survive.

How does the absence of cleavage in quartz affect the durability
of quartz sand?

HOW SHORE DRIFT MIGRATES. It is under the action of waves and
currents that shore drift migrates slowly along a coast. Where
waves strike a coast obliquely they drive the waste before them
little by little along the shore. Thus on a north-south coast,
where the predominant storms are from the northeast, there will be
a migration of shore drift southwards.

All shores are swept also by currents produced by winds and tides.
These are usually far too gentle to transport of themselves the
coarse materials of which beaches are made. But while the wave
stirs the grains of sand and gravel, and for a moment lifts them
from the bottom, the current carries them a step forward on their
way. The current cannot lift and the wave cannot carry, but
together the two transport the waste along the shore. The road of
shore drift is therefore the zone of the breaking waves.

THE BAY-HEAD BEACH. As the waste derived from the wear of waves
and that brought in by streams is trailed along a coast it
assumes, under varying conditions, a number of distinct forms.
When swept into the head of a sheltered bay it constitutes the
bay-head beach. By the highest storm waves the beach is often
built higher than the ground immediately behind it, and forms a
dam inclosing a shallow pond or marsh.

THE BAY BAR. As the stream of shore drift reaches the mouth of a
bay of some size it often occurs that, instead of turning in, it
sets directly across toward the opposite headland. The waste is
carried out from shore into the deeper waters of the bay mouth;
where it is no longer supported by the breaking waves, and sinks
to the bottom. The dump is gradually built to the surface as a
stubby spur, pointing across the bay, and as it reaches the zone
of wave action current and wave can now combine to carry shore
drift along it, depositing their load continually at the point of
the spur. An embankment is thus constructed in much the same
manner as a railway fill, which, while it is building, serves as a
roadway along which the dirt from an adjacent cut is carted to be
dumped at the end. When the embankment is completed it bridges the
bay with a highway along which shore drift now moves without
interruption, and becomes a bay bar.

INCOMPLETE BAY BARS. Under certain conditions the sea cannot carry
out its intention to bridge a bay. Rivers discharging in bays
demand open way to the ocean. Strong tidal currents also are able
to keep open channels scoured by their ebb and flow. In such cases
the most that land waste can do is to build spits and shoals,
narrowing and shoaling the channel as much as possible. Incomplete
bay bars sometimes have their points recurved by currents setting
at right angles to the stream of shore drift and are then
classified as HOOKS (Fig. 142).

SAND REEFS. On low coasts where shallow water extends some
distance out, the highway of shore drift lies along a low, narrow
ridge, termed the sand reef, separated from the land by a narrow
stretch of shallow water called the LAGOON. At intervals the reef
is held open by INLETS,--gaps through which the tide flows and
ebbs, and by which the water of streams finds way to the sea.

No finer example of this kind of shore line is to be found in the
world than the coast of Texas. From near the mouth of the Rio
Grande a continuous sand reef draws its even curve for a hundred
miles to Corpus Christi Pass, and the reefs are but seldom
interrupted by inlets as far north as Galveston Harbor. On this
coast the tides are variable and exceptionally weak, being less
than one foot in height, while the amount of waste swept along the
shore is large. The lagoon is extremely shallow, and much of it is
a mud flat too shoal for even small boats. On the coast of New
Jersey strong tides are able to keep open inlets at intervals of
from two to twenty miles in spite of a heavy alongshore drift.

Sand reefs are formed where the water is so shallow near shore
that storm waves cannot run in it and therefore break some
distance out from land. Where storm waves first drag bottom they
erode and deepen the sea floor, and sweep in sediment as far as
the line where they break. Here, where they lose their force, they
drop their load and beat up the ridge which is known as the sand
reef when it reaches the surface.

SHORES OF ELEVATION AND DEPRESSION

Our studies have already brought to our notice two distinct forms
of strand lines,--one the high, rocky coast cut back to cliffs by
the attack of the waves, and the other the low, sandy coast where
the waves break usually upon the sand reef. To understand the
origin of these two types we must know that the meeting place of
sea and land is determined primarily by movements of the earth's
crust. Where a coast land emerges the--shore line moves seaward;
where it is being submerged the shore line advances on the land.

SHORES OF ELEVATION. The retreat of the sea, either because of a
local uplift of the land or for any other reason, such as the
lowering of any portion of ocean bottom, lays bare the inner
margin of the sea floor. Where the sea floor has long received the
waste of the land it has been built up to a smooth, subaqueous
plain, gently shelving from the land. Since the new shore line is
drawn across this even surface it is simple and regular, and is
bordered on the one side by shallow water gradually deepening
seaward, and on the other by low land composed of material which
has not yet thoroughly consolidated to firm rock. A sand reef is
soon beaten up by the waves, and for some time conditions will
favor its growth. The loss of sand driven into the lagoon beyond,
and of that ground to powder by the surf and carried out to sea,
is more than made up by the stream of alongshore drift, and
especially by the drag of sediments to the reef by the waves as
they deepen the sea floor on its seaward side.

Meanwhile the lagoon gradually fills with waste from the reef and
from the land. It is invaded by various grasses and reeds which
have learned to grow in salt and brackish water; the marsh, laid
bare only at low tide, is built above high tide by wind drift and
vegetable deposits, and becomes a meadow, soldering the sand reef
to the mainland.

While the lagoon has been filling, the waves have been so
deepening the sea floor off the sand reef that at last they are
able to attack it vigorously. They now wear it back, and, driving
the shore line across the lagoon or meadow, cut a line of low
cliffs on the mainland. Such a shore is that of Gascony in
southwestern France,--a low, straight, sandy shore, bordered by
dunes and unprotected by reefs from the attack of the waves of the
Bay of Biscay.

We may say, then, that on shores of elevation the presence of sand
reefs and lagoons indicates the stage of youth, while the absence
of these features and the vigorous and unimpeded attack by the sea
upon the mainland indicate the stage of maturity. Where much waste
is brought in by rivers the maturity of such a coast may be long
delayed. The waste from the land keeps the sea shallow offshore
and constantly renews the sand reef. The energy of the waves is
consumed in handling shore drift, and no energy is left for an
effective attack upon the land. Indeed, with an excessive amount
of waste brought down by streams the land may be built out and
encroach temporarily upon the sea; and not until long denudation
has lowered the land, and thus decreased the amount of waste from
it, may the waves be able to cut through the sand reef and thus
the coast reach maturity.

SHORES OF DEPRESSION

Where a coastal region is undergoing submergence the shore line
moves landward. The horizontal plane of the sea now intersects an
old land surface roughened by subaerial denudation. The shore line
is irregular and indented in proportion to the relief of the land
and the amount of the submergence which the land has suffered. It
follows up partially submerged valleys, forming bays, and bends
round the divides, leaving them to project as promontories and
peninsulas. The outlines of shores of depression are as varied as
are the forms of the land partially submerged. We give a few
typical illustrations.

The characteristics of the coast of Maine are due chiefly to the
fact that a mountainous region of hard rocks, once worn to a
peneplain, and after a subsequent elevation deeply dissected by
north-south valleys, has subsided, the depression amounting on its
southern margin to as much as six hundred feet below sea level.
Drowned valleys penetrate the land in long, narrow bays, and
rugged divides project in long, narrow land arms prolonged seaward
by islands representing the high portions of their extremities. Of
this exceedingly ragged shore there are said to be two thousand
miles from the New Brunswick boundary as far west as Portland,--a
straight-line distance of but two hundred miles. Since the time of
its greatest depression the land is known to have risen some three
hundred feet; for the bays have been shortened, and the waste with
which their floors were strewn is now in part laid bare as clay
plains about the bay heads and in narrow selvages about the
peninsulas and islands.

The coast of Dalmatia, on the Adriatic Sea, is characterized by
long land arms and chains of long and narrow islands, all parallel
to the trend of the coast. A region of parallel mountain ranges
has been depressed, and the longitudinal valleys which lie between
them are occupied by arms of the sea.

Chesapeake Bay is a branching bay due to the depression of an
ancient coastal plain which, after having emerged from the sea,
was channeled with broad, shallow valleys. The sea has invaded the
valley of the trunk stream and those of its tributaries, forming a
shallow bay whose many branches are all directed toward its axis
(Fig. 146).

Hudson Bay, and the North, the Baltic, and the Yellow seas are
examples where the sinking of the land has brought the sea in over
low plains of large extent, thus deeply indenting the continental
out-line. The rise of a few hundred feet would restore these
submerged plains to the land.

THE CYCLE OF SHORES OF DEPRESSION. In its infantile stage the
outline of a shore of depression depends almost wholly on the
previous relief of the land, and but little on erosion by the sea.
Sea cliffs and narrow benches appear where headlands and outlying
islands have been nipped by the waves. As yet, little shore waste
has been formed. The coast of Maine is an example of this stage.

In early youth all promontories have been strongly cliffed, and
under a vigorous attack of the sea the shore of open bays may be
cut back also. Sea stacks and rocky islets, caves and coves, make
the shore minutely ragged. The irregularity of the coast, due to
depression, is for a while increased by differential wave wear on
harder and softer rocks. The rock bench is still narrow. Shore
waste, though being produced in large amounts, is for the most
part swept into deeper water and buried out of sight. Examples of
this stage are the east coast of Scotland and the California coast
near San Francisco.

Later youth is characterized by a large accumulation of shore
waste. The rock bench has been cut back so that it now furnishes a
good roadway for shore drift. The stream of alongshore drift grows
larger and larger, filling the heads of the smaller bays with
beaches, building spits and hooks, and tying islands with sand
bars to the mainland. It bridges the larger bays with bay bars,
while their length is being reduced as their inclosing
promontories are cut back by the waves. Thus there comes to be a
straight, continuous, and easy road, no longer interrupted by
headlands and bays, for the transportation of waste alongshore.
The Baltic coast of Germany is in this stage.

All this while streams have been busy filling with delta deposits
the bays into which they empty. By these steps a coast gradually
advances to MATURITY, the stage when the irregularities due to
depression have been effaced, when outlying islands formed by
subsidence have been planed away, and when the shore line has been
driven back behind the former bay heads. The sea now attacks the
land most effectively along a continuous and fairly straight line
of cliffs. Although the first effect of wave wear was to increase
the irregularities of the shore, it sooner or later rectifies it,
making it simple and smooth. Northwestern France may be cited as
an upland plain, dissected and depressed, whose coast has reached
maturity.

In the OLD AGE of coasts the rock bench is cut back so far that
the waves can no longer exert their full effect upon the shore.
Their energy is dissipated in moving shore drift hither and
thither and in abrading the bench when they drag bottom upon it.
Little by little the bench is deepened by tidal currents and the
drag of waves; but this process is so slow that meanwhile the sea
cliffs melt down under the weather, and the bench becomes a broad
shoal where waves and tides gradually work over the waste from the
land to greater fineness and sweep it out to sea.

PLAINS OF MARINE ABRASION. While subaerial denudation reduces the
land to baselevel, the sea is sawing its edges to WAVE BASE, i.e.
the lowest limit of the wave's effective wear. The widened rock
bench forms when uplifted a plain of marine abrasion, which like
the peneplain bevels across strata regardless of their various
inclinations and various degrees of hardness.

How may a plain of marine abrasion be expected to differ from a
peneplain in its mantle of waste?

Compared with subaerial denudation, marine abrasion is a
comparatively feeble agent. At the rate of five feet per century--
a higher rate than obtains on the youthful rocky, coast of
Britain--it would require more than ten million years to pare a
strip one hundred miles wide from the margin of a continent, a
time sufficient, at the rate at which the Mississippi valley is
now being worn away, for subaerial denudation to lower the lands
of the globe to the level of the sea.

Slow submergence favors the cutting of a wide rock bench. The
water continually deepens upon the bench; storm waves can
therefore always ride in to the base of the cliffs and attack them
with full force; shore waste cannot impede the onset of the waves,
for it is continually washed out in deeper water below wave base.

BASAL CONGOLMERATES. As the sea marches across the land during a
slow submergence, the platform is covered with sheets of sea-laid
sediments. Lowest of these is a conglomerate,--the bowlder and
pebble beach, widened indefinitely by the retreat of the cliffs at
whose base it was formed, and preserved by the finer deposits laid
upon it in the constantly deepening water as the land subsides.
Such basal conglomerates are not uncommon among the ancient rocks
of the land, and we may know them by their rounded pebbles and
larger stones, composed of the same kind of rock as that of the
abraded and evened surface on which they lie.





CHAPTER VIII

OFFSHORE AND DEEP-SEA DEPOSITS


The alongshore deposits which we have now studied are the exposed
edge of a vast subaqueous sheet of waste which borders the
continents and extends often for as much as two or three hundred
miles from land. Soundings show that offshore deposits are laid in
belts parallel to the coast, the coarsest materials lying nearest
to the land and the finest farthest out. The pebbles and gravel
and the clean, coarse sand of beaches give place to broad
stretches of sand, which grows finer and finer until it is
succeeded by sheets of mud. Clearly there is an offshore movement
of waste by which it is sorted, the coarser being sooner dropped
and the finer being carried farther out.

OFFSHORE DEPOSITS

The debris torn by waves from rocky shores is far less in amount
than the waste of the land brought down to the sea by rivers,
being only one thirty-third as great, according to a conservative
estimate. Both mingle alongshore in all the forms of beach and bar
that have been described, and both are together slowly carried out
to sea. On the shelving ocean floor waste is agitated by various
movements of the unquiet water,--by the undertow (an outward-
running bottom current near the shore), by the ebb and flow of
tides, by ocean currents where they approach the land, and by
waves and ground swells, whose effects are sometimes felt to a
depth of six hundred feet. By all these means the waste is slowly
washed to and fro, and as it is thus ground finer and finer and
its soluble parts are more and more dissolved, it drifts farther
and farther out from land. It is by no steady and rapid movement
that waste is swept from the shore to its final resting place. Day
after day and century after century the grains of sand and
particles of mud are shifted to and fro, winnowed and spread in
layers, which are destroyed and rebuilt again and again before
they are buried safe from further disturbance.

These processes which are hidden from the eye are among the most
important of those with which our science has to do; for it is
they which have given shape to by far the largest part of the
stratified rocks of which the land is made.

THE CONTINENTAL DELTA. This fitting term has been recently
suggested for the sheet of waste slowly accumulating along the
borders of the continents. Within a narrow belt, which rarely
exceeds two or three hundred miles, except near the mouths of
muddy rivers such as the Amazon and Congo, nearly all the waste of
the continent, whether worn from its surface by the weather, by
streams, by glaciers, or by the wind, or from its edge by the
chafing of the waves, comes at last to its final resting place.
The agencies which spread the material of the continental delta
grow more and more feeble as they pass into deeper and more quiet
water away from shore. Coarse materials are therefore soon dropped
along narrow belts near land. Gravels and coarse sands lie in
thick, wedge-shaped masses which thin out seaward rapidly and give
place to sheets of finer sand.

SEA MUDS. Outermost of the sediments derived from the waste of the
continents is a wide belt of mud; for fine clays settle so slowly,
even in sea water,--whose saltness causes them to sink much faster
than they would in fresh water,--that they are wafted far before
they reach a bottom where they may remain undisturbed. Muds are
also found near shore, carpeting the floors of estuaries, and
among stretches of sandy deposits in hollows where the more quiet
water has permitted the finer silt to rest.

Sea muds are commonly bluish and consolidate to bluish shales; the
red coloring matter brought from land waste--iron oxide--is
altered to other iron compounds by decomposing organic matter in
the presence of sea water. Yellow and red muds occur where the
amount of iron oxide in the silt brought down to the sea by rivers
is too great to be reduced, or decomposed, by the organic matter
present.

Green muds and green sand owe their color to certain chemical
changes which take place where waste from the land accumulates on
the sea floor with extreme slowness. A greenish mineral called
GLAUCONITE--a silicate of iron and alumina--is then formed. Such
deposits, known as GREEN SAND, are now in process of making in
several patches off the Atlantic coast, and are found on the
coastal plain of New Jersey among the offshore deposits of earlier
geological ages.

ORGANIC DEPOSITS. Living creatures swarm along the shore and on
the shallows out from land as nowhere else in the ocean. Seaweed
often mantles the rock of the sea cliff between the levels of high
and low tide, protecting it to some degree from the blows of
waves. On the rock bench each little pool left by the ebbing tide
is an aquarium abounding in the lowly forms of marine life. Below
low-tide level occur beds of molluscous shells, such as the
oyster, with countless numbers of other humble organisms. Their
harder parts--the shells of mollusks, the white framework of
corals, the carapaces of crabs and other crustaceans, the shells
of sea urchins, the bones and teeth of fishes--are gradually
buried within the accumulating sheets of sediment, either whole
or, far more often, broken into fragments by the waves.

By means of these organic remains each layer of beach deposits and
those of the continental delta may contain a record of the life of
the time when it was laid. Such a record has been made ever since
living creatures with hard parts appeared upon the globe. We shall
find it sealed away in the stratified rocks of the continents,--
parts of ancient sea deposits now raised to form the dry land.
Thus we have in the traces of living creatures found in the rocks,
i.e. in fossils, a history of the progress of life upon the
planet.

MOLLUSCOUS SHELL DEPOSITS. The forms of marine life of importance
in rock making thrive best in clear water, where little sediment
is being laid, and where at the same time the depth is not so
great as to deprive them of needed light, heat, and of sufficient
oxygen absorbed by sea water from the air. In such clear and
comparatively shallow water there often grow countless myriads of
animals, such as mollusks and corals, whose shells and skeletons
of carbonate of lime gradually accumulate in beds of limestone.

A shell limestone made of broken fragments cemented together is
sometimes called COQUINA, a local term applied to such beds
recently uplifted from the sea along the coast of Florida (Fig.
149).

OOLITIC limestone (oon, an egg; lithos, a stone) is so named from
the likeness of the tiny spherules which compose it to the roe of
fish. Corals and shells have been pounded by the waves to
calcareous sand, and each grain has been covered with successive
concentric coatings of lime carbonate deposited about it from
solution.

The impalpable powder to which calcareous sand is ground by the
waves settles at some distance from shore in deeper and quieter
water as a limy silt, and hardens into a dense, fine-grained
limestone in which perhaps no trace of fossil is found to suggest
the fact that it is of organic origin.

From Florida Keys there extends south to the trough of Florida
Straits a limestone bank covered by from five hundred and forty to
eighteen hundred feet of water. The rocky bottom consists of
limestone now slowly building from the accumulation of the remains
of mollusks, small corals, sea urchins, worms with calcareous
tubes, and lime-secreting seaweed, which live upon its surface.

Where sponges and other silica-secreting organisms abound on
limestone banks, silica forms part of the accumulated deposit,
either in its original condition, as, for example, the spicules of
sponges, or gathered into concretions and layers of flint.

Where considerable mud is being deposited along with carbonate of
lime there is in process of making a clayey limestone or a limy
shale; where considerable sand, a sandy limestone or a limy
sandstone.

CONSOLIDATION OF OFFSHORE DEPOSITS. We cannot doubt that all these
loose sediments of the sea floor are being slowly consolidated to
solid rock. They are soaked with water which carries in solution
lime carbonate and other cementing substances. These cements are
deposited between the fragments of shells and corals, the grains
of sand and the particles of mud, binding them together into firm
rock. Where sediments have accumulated to great thickness the
lower portions tend also to consolidate under the weight of the
overlying beds. Except in the case of limestones, recent sea
deposits uplifted to form land are seldom so well cemented as are
the older strata, which have long been acted upon by underground
waters deep below the surface within the zone of cementation, and
have been exposed to view by great erosion.

RIPPLE MARKS, SUN CRACKS, ETC. The pulse of waves and tidal
currents agitates the loose material of offshore deposits,
throwing it into fine parallel ridges called ripple marks. One may
see this beautiful ribbing imprinted on beach sands uncovered by
the outgoing tide, and it is also produced where the water is of
considerable depth. While the tide is out the surface of shore
deposits may be marked by the footprints of birds and other
animals, or by the raindrops of a passing shower.

The mud of flats, thus exposed to the sun and dried, cracks in a
characteristic way. Such markings may be covered over with a thin
layer of sediment at the next flood tide and sealed away as a
lasting record of the manner and place in which the strata were
laid. In Figure 150 we have an illustration of a very ancient
ripple-marked sand consolidated to hard stone, uplifted and set on
edge by movements of the earth's crust, and exposed to open air
after long erosion.