Tuesday, January 11, 2011

8:00 am - 5:30 pm

Field Trip:
Participants Board Buses at Holiday Inn Southwest & Viking Conference Center Entrance

Title:
Illinois ’ Sinkhole Plain: Where Ignorance is an Endangered Concept

Trip Leaders:
Samuel V. Panno (ISGS), Keith C. Hackley (ISGS), Walton R. Kelly (ISWS)

Location and Purpose of Trip:
An optional Field Trip will precede the technical sessions on Tuesday, January 11, 2010. This field trip is dedicated to the men and women of the Monroe-Randolph Bi-County Health Department, and particularly Joan Bade, for their valiant efforts in educating law-makers, the public and industry on how to live in harmony with karst terrane.

The field trip will take its participants into the heart of Illinois ’ sinkhole plain that lies on the western flank of the Illinois Basin . Here, the loess- and till-covered Mississippian-age limestone bedrock has given rise to a landscape of more than 10,000 cover-collapse sinkholes, active branchwork caves, and large picturesque springs.

Participants will cross lands with sinkhole densities greater than 80 sinkholes/km2, and visit a disappearing stream, a karst window, several large karst springs, and a saline spring. One of the stops, Falling Springs, includes a 15-meter high waterfall discharging from a small cave along a tufa-encrusted bluff.

The saline spring (one of two known in the area) has created a black, sulfide-coated elliptical depression (possibly due to mixing corrosion) and discharges to a small stream where white, filamentous, chemolithotrophic sulfide-oxidizing bacteria abound.

During the field trip, the participants will learn about the geology and hydrogeology of Illinois’ sinkhole plain, and ongoing research involving the use of chemistry, isotopes, and an rRNA gene in the identification and sources of nitrate and bacteria in contaminated wells and springs, the use of stalagmites in nearby caves to study the periodicity of large earthquakes (some of which were generated by the nearby New Madrid Seismic Zone), and the significance of saline springs in the Illinois Basin.