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An Alternative Explanation for the St. Lucia Cliffs An alternative explanation nevertheless deserves consideration. It is probable that when the original volcanic cones of St. Lucia were young they were reefless, because the large quantity of detritus that was washed down by their streams must have then formed a cobble and gravel beach around the island shores, as has been shown above to be the case with the nearly reefless island of Reunion. Hence around St. Lucia at that early stage in its history, as around Reunion today, the unhindered waves would have cut the shore back in cliffs with rock platforms of appropriate breadth at their base--"appropriate" here meaning that the rock platform breadth, somewhat increased by the external addition of a detrital embankment, should be to the cliff height about as the cosine is to the sine of the initial volcanic slope. As long as the island remained stationary and reefless, abrasion would be continued, the platform growing wider, the cliffs growing higher. But as soon as subsidence embayed the valleys the stream detritus would be. pocketed there, and the fringing reefs then formed on the submerged part of the cliff faces would grow up and form a barrier reef as the subsidence progressed; or perhaps the reefs might be originally established on offshore parts of the rock platform which were swept free of detritus--or on the larger cobbles of the platform which would have been little shifted by the waves after the platform depth was increased by subsidence. In either case, abrasion of the cliffs would thereafter cease. With this inferred history of the island in mind, it seems at least theoretically possible that the small spur-end cliffs on St. Lucia today may be, like the much greater spur-end cliffs above described on the southwest coast of Dominica, the tops of ancient cliffs which, after their partial submergence by island subsidence, have only been a little cut back by renewed abrasion in the Glacial epochs and since. But the acceptance of this explanation for St. Lucia and other similarly cliffed islands of the Lesser Antilles carries with it an unacceptable tacit postulate; namely, that, if the visible cliffs of these islands in the marginal belt are really the upper part of earlycut cliffs, then either the early cliffs must have been unusually high or island subsidence must have been unusually slow; while, on the other hand, the earlycut cliffs of islands in the broad coral seas must have been low or island subsidence there must have been rapid, because, apart from a few young islands, they have no spur-end cliffs. No sufficient reason can be found for such a relation between early cliff cutting and later subsidence on the one hand and the climatically limited areas of the narrow marginal belts and the much broader coral seas on the other hand. Hence, while the occasional survival of early-cut cliffs in plunging cliffs may happen here and there, especially on relatively young islands either in the marginal belts or in the coral seas--witness Dominica and Tahiti--the prevalent survival of such cliffs in particular oceanic areas like the marginal belts, defined by climatic rather than by diastrophic controls, is altogether improbable; and still more improbable is it on islands so ancient as St. Lucia and several of its neighbors. The here-proposed alternative explanation for the plunging cliffs of St. Lucia is therefore rejected, and return is made to the previously offered explanation which, as has been said, is satisfactory on various grounds. Home