The word "overlie" is correct and usable in written English.
It is a verb which means to lie or rest on something else. Example Sentence: The quilt overlies the bed.
Where these abut, the smooth one appears to overlie the rough.
Spectacular exposures of these rocks occur in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona, where they overlie the strongly deformed and contorted Vishnu Schist, the angularity of which stands in bold contrast to the almost horizontal bedding of the Grand Canyon Series.
Rocks of the Keweenawan System are about 10,700 metres (about 35,000 feet) thick, overlie rocks of the Huronian System, and underlie rocks of the Cambrian System; it has been suggested that the youngest Keweenawan rocks actually may be Cambrian in age.
The Thar's desert sands overlie Archean (early Precambrian) gneiss (metamorphic rocks formed between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago), Proterozoic (later Precambrian) sedimentary rocks (about 541 million to 2.5 billion years old), and more-recent alluvium (material deposited by rivers).
The highly varied Purbeck Beds, which overlie rocks of the Portland Beds, record a marked change in sedimentary facies, indicating major alterations in environmental conditions.
Strata mostly from the latter part of the Paleozoic Era (about 250 million years ago) overlie materials from the early part of the era in the Sierra Madre Occidental and to the west.
In 1986 Raymond Lafontaine, a Canadian art conserver, outlined how shining coloured light at a painting could counteract the effects of yellowish varnish overlying the image.
Luvisols are technically characterized by a surface accumulation of humus overlying an extensively leached layer that is nearly devoid of clay and iron-bearing minerals.
The subsiding air warms by compression and, coupled with cooling of the lowest layers overlying the cold ocean currents normally found off the west coasts of the continents, forms a pronounced temperature inversion (warm air over cold), called the trade-wind inversion.
This water, overlying the continental shelf, frequently has a southerly flow, counter to that of the Florida Current.
The term stratum identifies a single bed, or unit, normally greater than one centimetre in thickness and visibly separable from superjacent (overlying) and subjacent (underlying) beds.
