248 Adventures in Scenery 



above the surface of the sea. The intervening lands have been 

 submerged beneath the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel. 

 The projecting mountain tops, which appear as islands, are 

 thought to be the tops of uplifted faulted blocks, and the parts 

 of the range that are submerged may represent down-faulted 

 blocks. The Santa Monica Range, particularly in its western 

 portion, is broken by many faults. The submerged coastal 

 shelf has at a former time been dry land above the waves. Just 

 how much of the submerged land has been depressed by down- 

 ward faulting is not known. 



Core of Santa Ana Mountains a 

 Granitic Batholith 



The Santa Ana Mountain range belongs to the Peninsular 

 System. The range is about 40 miles long, lying 2 5 miles inland 

 from the Pacific Ocean. The core of the range is granitic rock, 

 which was intruded as a batholith under and into the rocks of 

 Triassic age, probably in Jurassic time. The range has played 

 hide and seek, so to speak, with the ocean during all the epochs 

 and periods of geologic time since early in the Mesozoic Era. 

 What occurred before that time we do not know. The oldest 

 sedimentary formation in the range is Triassic, as shown by 

 fossils that have been found in the rocks. 



Sea Sediments Flank Santa Ana Range 



During the almost inconceivably long time since the Triassic 

 (see table, p. 59) throughout the periods and epochs of Cre- 

 taceous and Tertiary time upheavals and down-sinkings of the 

 land have been going on. This is shown by the successive for- 

 mations of stratified marine sediments that have been deposited 

 and are now exposed in rock outcroppings on the slopes of the 

 range in eroded canyons and gullies. We speak of upheavals 

 and down-sinkings of the land, as we cannot conceive of the sea 

 rising over the land only as the land sinks below sea level. That 

 the sea has covered the land that is now the Santa Ana Range 



