New Cave? Sandstone Breakdown-Need Geologist opinion
Posted: Mar 28, 2010 11:00 am
A local we know has found what we think to be a cave in his front yard.
Originally there was a small crack he found while digging a foundation for a shed. The crack was blowing air.
Recently we contacted him and re-generated his curiousity in the crack. Well he went off the deep
end and brought in a back hoe and opened the whole thing up. When he removed a large boulder a huge
rush of cool air hit him and six others in the face like a smack! He requested we come check out the site
and WOW this guy ripped his front yard up like you wouldnt believe. Our issue is....as we surveyed
the site it is very dangerous in our opinion. It appears to be a large sandstone cap that had been severely up-heaved
and fractured at some point. There are several breakdown pockets creating small rooms. I could not feel the air the day we were there. We did cautiously explore as far as we felt it was safe to but it just kept going down through the sandstone fractures. We never saw any solid limestone which was our biggest worry with no solid rock for support.I know sandstone caps are very common above cave formations. Currently we have closed the site until we can gather further geologic information.We are having the landowners well specs checked over to see where they stopped using casings because they had hit limestone, hopefully giving us a clue as to how deep the sandstone may go before reaching solid limestone.
My question is how safe is it to explore this new cave? I know sandstone is week and we want to be safe.
How would one proceed to verify cave existence or not?
I have some pictures of the existing sandstone breakdown pockets.
Obviously a new cave excites us but we arent fools!
Thanks for any help!
Originally there was a small crack he found while digging a foundation for a shed. The crack was blowing air.
Recently we contacted him and re-generated his curiousity in the crack. Well he went off the deep
end and brought in a back hoe and opened the whole thing up. When he removed a large boulder a huge
rush of cool air hit him and six others in the face like a smack! He requested we come check out the site
and WOW this guy ripped his front yard up like you wouldnt believe. Our issue is....as we surveyed
the site it is very dangerous in our opinion. It appears to be a large sandstone cap that had been severely up-heaved
and fractured at some point. There are several breakdown pockets creating small rooms. I could not feel the air the day we were there. We did cautiously explore as far as we felt it was safe to but it just kept going down through the sandstone fractures. We never saw any solid limestone which was our biggest worry with no solid rock for support.I know sandstone caps are very common above cave formations. Currently we have closed the site until we can gather further geologic information.We are having the landowners well specs checked over to see where they stopped using casings because they had hit limestone, hopefully giving us a clue as to how deep the sandstone may go before reaching solid limestone.
My question is how safe is it to explore this new cave? I know sandstone is week and we want to be safe.
How would one proceed to verify cave existence or not?
I have some pictures of the existing sandstone breakdown pockets.
Obviously a new cave excites us but we arent fools!
Thanks for any help!