Related Directory Categories
- Mississippian-Moundbuilders (11)
- Mississippian (2)
Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Mississippian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Axis scale: millions of years ago.
The Mississippian is an epoch in the geologic timescale or a series of the geologic record. It is the earliest/lowermost of two divisions of the Carboniferous period lasting from roughly 359 to 318 Ma (million years ago). As with most other geochronologic units, the rock beds that define the period are well identified, but the exact start and end dates are uncertain by a few million years. The Mississippian is so named because rocks from this age are exposed in the Mississippi River valley.
In North America, where the interval consists primarily of marine limestones, it was in the past treated as a full-fledged geologic period between the Devonian and the Pennsylvanian. In Europe, the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian are one more-or-less continuous sequence of lowland continental deposits and are grouped together as the Carboniferous system. During the Mississippian Epoch an important phase of orogeny occurred in the Appalachian Mountains.
| Early Mississippian | (359.2 ± 2.5 – 345.3 ± 2.1 Ma) |
| Middle Mississippian | (345.3 ± 2.1 – 326.4 ± 1.6 Ma) |
| Late Mississippian | (326.4 ± 1.6 – 318.1 ± 1.3 Ma) |
| Carboniferous period | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mississippian | Pennsylvanian | ||||
| Lower/Early | Middle | Upper/Late | Lower/Early | Middle | Upper/Late |
| Tournaisian | Viséan | Serpukhovian | Bashkirian | Moscovian | Kasimovian | Gzhelian |
