noun
definition
A series of sandstones and schists overlying the true nummulitic formation in the Alps, and included in the Eocene Tertiary.
Examples of flysch in a Sentence
Next, proceeding from this region in an easterly direction, are the Neogene freshwater formations, filling up the greatest part of the north-east of Bosnia, as also a zone of flysch intermingled with several strips of eruptive rock.
It is divided longitudinally into an outer zone of Molasse and an inner zone of Flysch.
The line of separation is very clearly defined; nowhere does the Molasse pass beyond it to the south and nowhere does the Flysch extend beyond it to the north.
The Molasse, in the neighbourhood of the mountains, consists chiefly of conglomerates and sandstones, and the Flysch consists of sandstones and shales; but the Molasse is of Miocene and Oligocene age, while the Flysch is mainly Eocene.
Along the line of contact, which is often a fault, the oldest beds of the Molasse crop out, and they are invariably overturned and plunge beneath the Flysch.
The Flysch is an extraordinarily thick and uniform mass of sandstones and shales with scarcely any fossils excepting fucoids.
Eocene beds, indeed, penetrate farther within the chain, but these are limestones with nummulites or lignite-bearing shales and have nothing in common with the Flysch.
But although the Flysch is so uniform in character, and although it forms so well-defined a zone, it is not everywhere of the same age.
The most probable explanation is that the Flysch consists of the detritus washed down from the hills upon the flanks of which it was formed.
The zone of the Molasse is little changed, but the Flysch is partly folded in the Mesozoic belt and no longer forms an absolutely independent band.
Both occasionally assume the form of Flysch.
The Jurassic and Cretaceous beds are ordinary marine sediments, but from the Cenomanian to the Oligocene the deposits are of the peculiar facies known in the Alps and Carpathians as Flysch.