第74章 ON THE OLDER TERTIARY FORMATIONS OF PATAGONIA AND

River of S.Cruz; here 280 feet above sea.)In ascending the valley of the S.Cruz, the upper strata of the coast-cliffs are prolonged, with nearly the same characters, for fifty miles: at about this point, they begin in the most gradual and scarcely perceptible manner, to be banded with white lines; and after ascending ten miles farther, we meet with distinct thin layers of whitish, greenish, and yellowish fine-grained, fusible sediments.At eighty miles from the coast, in a cliff thus composed, there were a few layers of ferruginous sandstone, and of an argillaceous sandstone with concretions of marl like those in the Pampas.(At this spot, for a space of three-quarters of a mile along the north side of the river, and for a width of half a mile, there has been a great slip, which has formed hills between sixty and seventy feet in height, and has tilted the strata into highly inclined and even vertical positions.The strata generally dipped at an angle of 45 degrees towards the cliff from which they had slided.I have observed in slips, both on a small and large scale, that this inward dip is very general.Is it due to the hydrostatic pressure of water percolating with difficulty through the strata acting with greater force at the base of the mass than against the upper part?) At one hundred miles from the coast, that is at a central point between the Atlantic and the Cordillera, we have the section in Figure 18.

The upper half of the sedimentary mass, under the basaltic lava, consists of innumerable zones of perfectly white bright green, yellowish and brownish, fine-grained, sometimes incoherent, sedimentary matter.The white, pumiceous, trachytic tuff-like varieties are of rather greater specific gravity than the pumiceous mudstone on the coast to the north;some of the layers, especially the browner ones, are coarser, so that the broken crystals are distinguishable with a weak lens.The layers vary in character in short distances.With the exception of a few of the Ostrea Patagonica, which appeared to have rolled down from the cliff above, no organic remains were found.The chief difference between these layers taken as a whole, and the upper beds both at the mouth of the river and on the coast northward, seems to lie in the occasional presence of more colouring matter, and in the supply having been intermittent; these characters, as we have seen, very gradually disappear in descending the valley, and this fact may perhaps be accounted for by the currents of a more open sea having blended together the sediment from a distant and intermittent source.

The coloured layers in the foregoing section rest on a mass, apparently of great thickness (but much hidden by the talus), of soft sandstone, almost composed of minute pebbles, from one-tenth to two-tenths of an inch in diameter, of the rocks (with the entire exception of the basaltic lava)composing the great boulders on the surface of the plain, and probably composing the neighbouring Cordillera.Five miles higher up the valley, and again thirty miles higher up (that is twenty miles from the nearest range of the Cordillera), the lower plain included within the upper escarpments, is formed, as seen on the banks of the river, of a nearly similar but finer-grained, more earthy, laminated sandstone, alternating with argillaceous beds, and containing numerous moderately sized pebbles of the same rocks, and some shells of the great Ostrea Patagonica.(I found at both places, but not in situ, quantities of coniferous and ordinary dicotyledonous silicified wood, which was examined for me by Mr.R.Brown.)As most of these shells had been rolled before being here embedded, their presence does not prove that the sandstone belongs to the great Patagonian tertiary formation, for they might have been redeposited in it, when the valley existed as a sea-strait; but as amongst the pebbles there were none of basalt, although the cliffs on both sides of the valley are composed of this rock, I believe that the sandstone does belong to this formation.At the highest point to which we ascended, twenty miles distant from the nearest slope of the Cordillera, I could see the horizontally zoned white beds, stretching under the black basaltic lava, close up to the mountains;so that the valley of the S.Cruz gives a fair idea of the constitution of the whole width of Patagonia.

BASALTIC LAVA OF THE S.CRUZ.

This formation is first met with sixty-seven miles from the mouth of the river; thence it extends uninterruptedly, generally but not exclusively on the northern side of the valley, close up to the Cordillera.The basalt is generally black and fine-grained, but sometimes grey and laminated; it contains some olivine, and high up the valley much glassy feldspar, where, also, it is often amygdaloidal; it is never highly vesicular, except on the sides of rents and on the upper and lower, spherically laminated surfaces.

It is often columnar; and in one place I saw magnificent columns, each face twelve feet in width, with their interstices filled up with calcareous tuff.The streams rest conformably on the white sedimentary beds, but Inowhere saw the actual junction; nor did I anywhere see the white beds actually superimposed on the lava; but some way up the valley at the foot of the uppermost escarpments, they must be thus superimposed.Moreover, at the lowest point down the valley, where the streams thin out and terminate in irregular projections, the spaces or intervals between these projections are filled up to the level of the now denuded and gravel-capped surfaces of the plains, with the white-zoned sedimentary beds; proving that this matter continued to be deposited after the streams had flowed.Hence we may conclude that the basalt is contemporaneous with the upper parts of the great tertiary formation.