Evidence Of Water
by Jon Burch Photography
Title
Evidence Of Water
Artist
Jon Burch Photography
Medium
Photograph - Digital Capture/faa Watermark Will Not Be On Your Finished Photograph.
Description
The Western Interior Seaway also known as the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, and the North American Inland Sea was a large inland sea that existed during the mid- to late Cretaceous period as well as the very early Paleogene, splitting the continent of North America into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The ancient sea stretched from the Gulf of Mexico and through the middle of the modern-day countries of the United States and Canada, meeting with the Arctic Ocean to the north. At its largest, it was 2,500 feet deep, 600 miles wide and over 2,000 miles long.
The Seaway was created as the Farallon tectonic plate subducted under the North American Plate during the Cretaceous Period. As plate convergence proceeded, the younger and more buoyant lithosphere of the Farallon Plate subducted at a shallow angle, in what is known as a "flat slab". This shallowly-subducting slab exerted traction on the base of the lithosphere, pulling it down and producing dynamic topography at the surface that caused the opening of the Western Interior Seaway. This depression and the high eustatic sea levels existing during the Cretaceous allowed waters from the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Gulf of Mexico in the south to meet and flood the central lowlands, forming a sea that grew and receded over the course of the Cretaceous.
The earliest phase of the Seaway began in the mid-Cretaceous when an arm of the Arctic Ocean grew south over western North America; this formed the Mowry Sea, so named for the Mowry Shale, an organic-rich rock formation. In the south, the Gulf of Mexico was an extension of the Tethys Sea, which met with the Mowry Sea in the late Cretaceous, forming the "complete" Seaway.
At its largest, the Western Interior Seaway stretched from the Rockies east to the Appalachians, some 1,000 km wide. At its deepest, it may have been only 800 or 900 meters deep, shallow in terms of seas. Two great continental watersheds drained into it from east and west, diluting its waters and bringing resources in eroded silt that formed shifting delta systems along its low-lying coasts. There was little sedimentation on the eastern shores of the Seaway; the western boundary, however, consisted of a thick clastic wedge eroded eastward from the Sevier orogenic belt. The western shore was thus highly variable, depending on variations in sea level and sediment supply.
Image made on Dinosaur Ridge west of Denver, Colorado and copyright 2017 Jon Burch Photography
Uploaded
September 3rd, 2017
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