Cuesta

Escarpment face of a cuesta broken by a fault.
Cumberland Plateau Tennessee.

Schematic cross section of a cuesta, dipslopes facing left, and harder rocklayers in darker colors than softer ones

Cuestas in geology are ridges formed by gently tilted hard rock layers. Every cuesta has a steep slope where the rock layers are exposed on their edges, called an escarpment. Usually an erosion resistant rock layer also has a more gentle slope on the other side of the ridge called a 'dip slope'.

Two well-known cuestas in western New York and southern Ontario are the Niagara escarpment and the Onondaga escarpment, where the dip is about 40 feet per mile to the south. The escarpment edge faces north and in its most populated section runs roughly parallel to the southern Lake Ontario shoreline.

The Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas is punctuated by a series of cuestas that parallel the coast. The cuestas have gentle slopes gulfward to the southeast, and steeper northwest-facing escarpments. The Reynosa Plateau is the most coastward cuesta, which sees surface expression with the Bordes-Oakville escarpment on the northwest side and a low ridge on the eastern boundary called the Reynosa cuesta where the deposits dip below later Pliocene-Pleistocene deposits of the Willis and Lissie Formation.

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