Peace River Formation
lithostratigraphic layer in Canada
The Peace River Formation is a stratigraphic unit of middle Albian age in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.
It takes the name from the Peace River, and was first described on the banks of the river, downstream from the Smoky River confluence to the mouth of the Notikewin River by McConnell in 1893.
Lithology
The Peace River Formation consists of greywacke, coal, coarse to fine marine sandstone and dark, fissile, non-calcareous shale.
Hydrocarbon production
Gas is produced from the Cadotte Member in northern-western Alberta.
Distribution
The Peace River Formation is 60 feet (20 m) thick on average. The formation has different extents at different stages, with the Paddy Member present only in the Peace River Country in northern Alberta south of Clear Hills, while the Cadotte Member and the Harmon Member occur in both Alberta and north-eastern British Columbia.
Physiography
The Peace River Lowland, a landform region in the Alberta Plateau, is a gently rolling lowland without clearly defined outer boundaries extending east of the Rocky Mountains on both sides of the Peace River and sloping downward to the north and east. The higher hills in the foothills east of the Rockies in northeastern British Columbia have elevations of about 1000 m and the plains west of Lake Athabasca are about 300 m above sea level. The lowland's Quaternary sediments of the former lake bottom of Glacial Lake Peace are underlain by Upper and Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks mainly shales of the Shaftesbury formation and sandstones of the Dunvegan and Peace River formations. The Peace River and its immediate tributaries have incised almost 200 meters into the sediments and into the Cretaceous bedrock in the western section but only about 70 meters in the east side further north around Fort Vermilion.
“Peace River Formation” enters the record as lithostratigraphic layer in Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peace, River and Formation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Peace River Formation” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Peace, River and Formation provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7157439. Authority coordinates are 56.200, -117.333. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893 and 1000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peace River Formation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.