Book Cliffs

The Book Cliffs Range is a mountain range in western Colorado and eastern Utah.

Description and history

Stretching nearly 200 miles from east to west, the Book Cliffs mountain range begins where the Colorado River descends south through De Beque Canyon into the Grand Valley (near Palisade, Colorado) to Price Canyon (near Helper, Utah). The range is largely composed of sedimentary materials. The name of the range comes from the cliffs of Cretaceous sandstones which cap many south facing buttes that appear similar to a shelf of books. The Book Cliffs are within the Colorado Plateau geologic province.

tratigraphy

There are several sedimentary cycles visible in the cliffs (perhaps up to seven or eight).The Book Cliffs of southeastern Utah and western Colorado are one of the world's best places to study sequence stratigraphy. In the 1980s, Exxon scientists used the Cretaceous strata of the Book Cliffs to develop the science of sequence stratigraphy. The Book Cliffs have preserved excellent strata of the foreland basin of the ancient Western Interior Seaway that stretched north south from the Gulf of Mexico to the Yukon in the Cretaceous time. Components of deltaic and shallow marine reservoirs are very well preserved in the Book Cliffs. Earth scientists from the world over visit the Book Cliffs to view analogues of what they are exploring for in the subsurface.

External links

* [http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/crepaleo.html Cretaceous Paleogeography - Showing Western Interior Seaway]
* [http://www.coopext.colostate.edu/TRA/PLANTS/index.html#http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CoopExt/TRA/PLANTS/bookclif The Soils of Western Colorado Mesa, Delta and Montrose Counties]
* [http://www.onlineutah.com/miningcoal.shtml Utah History Encyclopedia]