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An epeiric sea (also known as an epicontinental sea) is a large but shallow body of salt water that lies over a part of a continent.
Epeiric seas are usually associated with the marine transgressions of the early (and current) Cenozoic era and may be semi-cyclic — during eras of glacial recession given a period of low mountains coupled with a warming under the influence of plate tectonics. They can be warm or cold; indeed, several were present at the end of the last Ice Age, when sea level rose more rapidly than some areas could isostatically adjust. Modern examples are the Persian Gulf, the North Sea, and Hudson Bay.
The most notable North American examples, geographically, are world class in scope: The miles of sea-bed deposits east of the Sierra Nevada mountains and west of the continental divide formed by the Rockies carved out by the Colorado River valley known as the Grand Canyon and on grander scale, the whole of the interior of the North American continental heartlands, from Great Slave Lake, Great Bear Lake and Hudson Bay above the artic circle southerly through the Great Lakes region westerly through the whole of the Missouri-Mississippi rivers drainage basin east and north of the Appalachian Mountain range including all of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other southern United States states west to the Rockies and northern Mexico1 — in other words the entirety of the great plains and bordering hill regions in Canada through to the southern USA. The eastern regions are the areas, not incoincidentally, threatened by rising sea levels if global warming melts the next quarter of the remaining ice caps.
See also
- Champlain Sea
- Eromanga Sea
- Sundance Sea
- Sequence stratigraphy
- Turgai Sea
- Tyrrell Sea
- Western Interior Seaway
- Zechstein Sea
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 24 November 2008, at 06:17.
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