Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve" dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church second phase of the national disaster was beginning. was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing

<question>:
What major change happened to the country's landscape as the tragedy continued?

<options>:
A State lines were made to be different after the upsets by the earthquakes.
B Much of the landscape is upset by the earthquakes, throwing dirt and dust everywhere.
C Several states totally sink, and water takes its place.
D New cliffs and fault lines continued to form.

<answer>:

C