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Niagara Escarpment

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Niagara Escarpment

The Niagara Escarpment is an approximately 1,050-kilometre-long (650-mile) discontinuous, arc-shaped, but generally northward-facing escarpment, or cuesta, in Canada and the United States. The escarpment begins south of Lake Ontario and circumscribes the top of the Great Lakes Basin running from New

York through Ontario, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The escarpment is the cliff over which the Niagara River plunges at Niagara Falls, for which it is named. The escarpment is a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. The reserve has the oldest forest ecosystem and trees in eastern North America. The Niagara Escarpment is not a fault line but the result of unequal erosion. The cliff-forming rock exposed along the escarpment is a belt of limestone and dolomite of the Lockport Formation of Silurian age. The Niagara Escarpment is the most prominent of several escarpments formed in the bedrock of the Great Lakes Basin. For example, the Onondaga Formation, which runs in a parallel outcrop belt just to the south of the Lockport Formation through western New York and southern Ontario, forms a separate escarpment. The Niagara Escarpment traces, and in part shapes, the individual basins and landforms of Lake...

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