Tertiary fluvial gravels and evolution of the Western Canadian Prairie Landscape

The early Tertiary of Western Canada and northern United States was marked by a change from compressional to extensional tectonics. The result was regional uplift and magmatic events. The uplift resulted in a major unconformity and deposition of extensive regional sheets of gravel and sand, of which only isolated remnants remain. These units are the Eocene to Miocene Cypress Hills Formation, the Miocene Wood Mountain Formation, Miocene Flaxville Formation and preglacial Souris River gravels, All four stratigraphic units consist of gravel and sand with lesser amounts of clay. The formations were largely deposited as laterally continuous sheets of braided river gravels, with some occurrences of meandering-river sedimentation. The sediment was deposited several hundred kilometres downstream of their source areas. Paleocurrent data for the Cypress Hills and Wood Mountain formations indicate that regional paleoslope dipped towards the north-northeast. The modern prairie landscape of western Canada began to evolve with the deposition of these gravels during the Eocene with creation of a basin-wide unconformity followed by deposition of an extensive braidplain system that was subsequently uplifted, incised, and molded into its present form.