If the Vailian theory claims are valid the beds in the Rocky Mountain
Tertiary must present the following features: The Cretaceous period
having been brought to a close by a down-rush of waters and snows in
the northern hemisphere, a stream of water pouring southward must to a
great extent have been a fresh-water current, and those deposits in
the extreme northern beds of the Rocky Mountain region must be largely
fresh-water accumulations. Those in the middle of this region must
be to a less extent fresh-water; perhaps sometimes fresh and again
marine, owing to changes in currents, etc., and the two be commingled,
while in the southern part the beds must be almost exclusively marine.
Fortunately for the Vailian theory these demands are fully met. The
waters of this vast region communicated with the Arctic ocean, probably
by way of the present depression in British America, along the valley
of the McKenzie river, while south it communicated with the Gulf of
Mexico.
Here was a sea forty times larger than Lake Erie. Where did the water
come from that made the northern part fresh, the middle part brackish
and the southern portion marine? The Tertiary of the Pacific Coast is
marine; so is a larger portion of the Atlantic border. Doubtless Davis
Strait poured a volume of fresh-water from the polar world into the
Atlantic, for there is the same commingling of marine and fresh-water
shells on the northeast coast, while in the northern part they are
exclusively fresh-water species. Rivers could not have done this, for
all the rivers from Delaware Bay around the coast of the Gulf of Mexico
were not sufficient to lay down fresh-water Tertiary. Admit that the
vast polar ocean of the Tertiary period was a body of fresh-water, and
all difficulties disappear.
Geologists admit that in the Tertiary period mountains were made
on every continent, that there was a world-wide disturbance of
strata, and the most complete extermination of species on record.
The Cretaceous world was swept by a mighty cataclysmic wave, and its
animals were buried in the detrital mass swept from the land into
the seas and formed the lower Eocene beds. Nothing of which we can
conceive could do this but a downpour of Annular waters. One-third of
North America, a great part of Northern Europe, nearly all of Siberia,
much of China, and other parts of Asia were apparently synchronously
submerged beneath _fresh-water_.
The ocean of fresh-water proves the augmentation of snows from the
great super-aerial fund. The Cretaceous age closed by excessive and
unusual refrigeration. The transported blocks of stone found in the
Upper Cretaceous and Lower Tertiary point to a northern origin. The
evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of an Annular fall of waters in the
north polar world at that time.
Existing continents were submerged under Cretaceous waters. The Rocky
Mountains, Andes, Alps and Himalayas were either unborn or in their
infant stage. But some mighty barrier was raised that rolled the
Cretaceous waters southward, and made an isolated fresh-water ocean on
the north. It was the great Atlantic plateau reaching from Newfoundland
to Ireland, which is known by actual soundings and other evidence to be
a submerged table land. It was raised from the deep at this very time
and stood for uncounted milleniums as dry land.
Suppose an ice cap 5000 feet thick should suddenly cover the Arctic
world. It would press that part of the globe inward and downward upon
itself even if the planet were solid to the centre. It would render the
rocks plastic and they would be pushed under the continents causing the
crust of the earth to rise into mountains in many places. Just what
occurred in Cretaceous and Tertiary times.
We can trace the shore-line of an almost limitless fresh-water sea
around the whole hemisphere in Tertiary times, showing that the Arctic
ocean was a wide expanse of fresh-waters. This leads to the positive
and permanent establishment of the Vailian or Annular theory.