Abstract
DR. G. DE P. COTTER, until recently a superintendent of the Geological Survey of India, has utilized the experience of a lifetime spent in the field in India in summarizing the present state of knowledge of the geology of the peninsula. There are no Palaeozoic rocks there older than the Talchir Boulder Bed at the base of the Gond-wanas, which is regarded, with fair confidence, as Upper Carboniferous. The glaciation was more intense in the south, where ice-scratched rockfloors and boulders occur, whereas in the Himalayas (in Spiti and Kashmir) the representative of the Boulder Bed is a basal conglomerate which may have been deposited by floating bergs. Since India is the only land north of the equator where the Boulder Bed occurs, Cotter is inclined to accept the hypothesis of continental drift and to regard the Indian fragment of Gondwanaland as having drifted northwards from its original home south of the equator, leaving behind it portions of its mass in Madagascar, the Chagos archipelago and the submerged land which forms the platform of the Maldives and Laccadives. Elsewhere the latter is regarded as the extension of the Aravalli Range.
Regionale Geologie der Erde
Herausgegeben von Karl Andrée H. A. Brouwer W. H. Bucher. Band 1, Abschnitt 6: The Indian Peninsula and Ceylon, by G. de P. Cotter. Pp. 66 + vi. (Leipzig: Akademische Verlags-gesellschaft m.b.H., 1938.)
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STAMP, L. Regionale Geologie der Erde. Nature 145, 725 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145725a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145725a0