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Full-Text Articles in Earth Sciences

Controls On Speleogenesis In The Upper-Mississippian Pennington Formation On The Western Cumberland Plateau Escarpment, Hali Steinmann Oct 2018

Controls On Speleogenesis In The Upper-Mississippian Pennington Formation On The Western Cumberland Plateau Escarpment, Hali Steinmann

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Much of the pioneering work on caves of the Cumberland Plateau (province spanning Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia) has been stratigraphically located within the Mississippian Bangor and Monteagle Limestones, wherein some of the region’s largest and most spectacular caves occur. Of interest to the understanding of this karst landscape, but severely underrepresented in the literature thereof, are caves and karst features in a heterogeneous sequence of clastics and carbonates known collectively as the Pennington Formation (Upper Mississippian). This work consisted of a regional study of Pennington caves on the western Cumberland Plateau escarpment (Alabama and Tennessee), and a case study …


Drip Water Measurements From Carlsbad Cavern: Implications Towards Paleoclimate Records Yielded From Evaporative-Zone Stalagmites, Victor J. Polyak, Jessica B.T. Rasmussen, Yemane Asmerom Jun 2018

Drip Water Measurements From Carlsbad Cavern: Implications Towards Paleoclimate Records Yielded From Evaporative-Zone Stalagmites, Victor J. Polyak, Jessica B.T. Rasmussen, Yemane Asmerom

International Journal of Speleology

Stalagmites can host numerous potential climate proxies (stable and radiogenic isotopes, trace elements, annual and non-annual banding, grayscale, growth hiatuses, mineral assemblage). Reproducibility and/or integration of proxy results between one or more stalagmites will become increasingly important, and ideally, climate records generated by multiple stalagmites from the same cave or cave room are expected to be near-identical. The reality is that stalagmites from the same cave room can yield differing results to some degree, especially in cave environment zones that are evaporative. Our drip water study in an evaporative shallow-depth cave environment in Carlsbad Cavern shows that adjacent drip sites …