562 N. H. DARTON 
leaves this valley in the northeastern part of the city and reaches the 
river through a short rocky gorge. The deposits in the old creek 
valley are nearly too feet thick in places, so that their base is con- 
siderably below the level of the river. The bottom of this old 
valley presents considerable irregularity of contour with several 
deeper basins but bore holes and shafts are too widely scattered to 
throw much light on the details of topography. 
Lackawanna buried valley —The lower 3 miles of the valley of 
Lackawanna River are underlain by a buried valley which is con- 
fluent with the old valley of the Susquehanna 2 miles above Pittston. 
This buried valley of the Lackawanna has great declivity, for its 
channel deepens rapidly and its bottom is more than 150 feet below 
the present surface in the deep hole at its junction with the buried 
valley of the Susquehanna. Several basins, branching channels, 
and other features have been revealed by many bore holes, most of 
which are shown in FIGé. 1. 
The origin of the buried valleys.—The history of the buried valleys 
of Susquehanna River and the other similar features in the same 
region is somewhat difficult to explain satisfactorily. The channel 
is not an ordinary valley with continuous declivity, but, as shown by 
the map and section, it contains elongated rock-rimmed troughs and 
basins which could not have been eroded by ordinary stream action 
as suggested by some previous observers. The rock probably is at. 
no great depth below the present river-bed a short distance below 
Nanticoke, and, even if this is not the case, ledges cross not very far 
southwest, so the buried valley as a whole is a basin. Deformation 
of an ordinary river valley since the valley was developed, as sug- 
gested by Lyman' and Corse,’ is out of the question, for there are 
too many small depressions and ridges to be accounted for and the 
Quaternary deposits along the sides of the present valley show no 
signs of such disturbance. Probably in early Glacial time the valley 
was excavated by a river to a grade considerably below the present 
water level, but the precise depth can only be surmised. The 
general structure of the Wyoming Valley, a synclinal basin with a 
thick mass of relatively soft coal measures lying on the harder rocks, ~ 
1 Philadelphia Acad. Sci. Proc., LIV, 507-9. 
2 Wyoming Hist. and Geol. Soc., Proc., VIII, 42-44. 
