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wyandottecaver wrote: Why would a "scientific" definition of a geologic feature use such a ludicrous unit of measure as "a person", unless of course it was because persons were what you wanted to regulate!
I do think it is useful to distinguish between karst features and caves as many states do. I've often thought that trying to define "a cave" is much like trying to define "a rock". You can get something that applies to all rocks but it's not otherwise very useful.
we would be much better served by developing science based categorization systems where you might have several tiers of cave definitions (think stratigraphy) based on things like biological systems, volume, area beyond twilight, origin process, etc.
as to the rock analogy:
"Same source: "rock: An aggregate of one or more minerals, e.g. granite, shale, marble; or a body of undifferentiated mineral matter, e.g., obsidian, or of solid organic matter, e.g. coal.
Sounds pretty useful to me."
Useful for what? saying that a rock isn't a tree? yes..unless of course we compress the tree to "solid organic matter" then its a rock? Not to say the AGI definitions aren't useful for their purposes, but not very helpful in describing and delineating features for this discussion in my opinion
I admittedly was not clear in my post by what I meant by "useful". I was intending my remark to imply that the federal "cave" definition was not useful from the standpoint of standardizing state cave surveys. the AGI definition of caves and rocks may be useful for their applications
I only included biology as 1 variable in an incomplete list of variables as examples of things that might be used to develop a classification system, not as "the" system.
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