The Cincinnati Anticline

There's a natural formation known (primarily to geologists) as the Cincinnati Anticline. It's a vast oval-shaped area that extends over the three-way intersection of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, and extending well into central Kentucky. The oval's Eastern side runs along Cincinnati, hence the name.

According to the book Elements of Geology by William Harmon Norton, the anticline is of great interest to those studying the fossil record. The anticline is almost entirely composed of Ordovician strata, and the Silurian and Devonian decrease as they approach it. Norton takes this to mean that the anticline is "an island upwarped from the sea at the close of the Ordovician or shortly thereafter."

Supposedly it's this anticline that makes much of Kentucky so rich in fossils from the ancient ocean, including the Falls of the Ohio along Louisville's riverside - and yet the Falls of the Ohio is said to be of Devonian origin, not Ordovician. I leave the matter for professional geologists to sort out.

According to a surprisingly florid bit of text in the usually dry Kentucky Encyclopedia, the anticline is also indirectly responsible for Kentucky being the thoroughbred horse capitol of the world. Early settlers noticed the geological qualities of the anticline contributed to making Kentucky a land with densely fertile soil, rich in calcium and phosphorus, and this in turn led to it being prized by horse ranchers:

"This legacy of phosphatic limestone, inherited from millions of shells and skeletons, deposited millions of years earlier when central Kentucky was an ocean bed, was now to be used to build the skeletons of horses... the phosphatic limestone which forms the basis of central Kentucky's soil has proved its efficacy."

The anticline also just happens to roughly correspond to the area affected by the 1895 Charleston, Missouri, earthquake along the New Madrid Fault (see area indicated in red in the image above).

Kentucky Dropstones

Though Glacial Dropstones are a phenonema found all around the world, Kentucky is one of several states especially good for finding them - this is partially because it has a high quotient of roadcuts through mountains that remain largely untouched since their creation. (For this same reason, Kentucky's a great place for fossil-hunting, too. I've gathered many a trilobite from the rocky roadcuts at the side of Kentucky highways.)

What are dropstones? They're rocks - ranging from boulders to pebbles - that occupy an anomalous place in the geologic record. A few are the results of volcanic eruption, but the vast majority of them got there because they were carried there by glaciers in prehistory. These dropstones occur all over the planet, indicating that the entire world was once encased in ice.

According to Frank R. Ettensohn's recent scientific report called Kentucky Dropstones and the Case for Late Devonian Alpine Glaciation in the Appalachian Basin (USA) with Implications for Appalachian Tectonics and Black-Shale Sedimentation:

A nearly three-ton, granitic boulder was found embedded within uppermost parts of the Upper Devonian (Famennian; praesulcata Zone) Cleveland Shale Member of the Ohio Shale in Rowan County, northeastern Kentucky, and most recently, an in-situ boulder was noted from the subsurface Bedford Shale in eastern Kentucky. Other, anomalous, igneous and metamorphic boulders have been found near Cleveland exposures in the area, but none were in situ, prompting previous workers to ascribe their origins to ice-rafting in proposed, Pleistocene proglacial lakes, accompanying glaciation to the north. The in-situ nature of the new find, dated age of the boulder lithology (470 Ma), as well as compositional aspects of this and other likely dropstone boulders, strongly suggest Appalachian origins.

Berea Mystery Fossil

This fossil, inside a nodule of iron-saturated chert, was discovered in a creek bed approximately 1.5 miles southeast of Berea. Identification of just what it's a fossil of has baffled scientists.

It most closely resembles a sort of a squashed orthoconic nautiloid, but that would be extremely rare in the geological strata at which this fossil was found.

The photo below is one such orthoconic nautiloid fossil, also found in Kentucky. However, this specimen is from the Ordovician period, whereas the mystery fossil is believed to be either Mississipian or Devonian.


See more images of the mystery fossil here.

Floracliff

The Floracliff Nature Preserve, located in southern Fayette County, is an amazing 287-acre haven for wildlife, especially known for its varied collection of wildflower species. But what interests me most about it is an enormous weird mineral tufa.

According to naturepreservesky.gov:

"Floracliff also harbors a significant geological feature. Below Elk Lick Falls is a tufa formation, which resembles a frozen waterfall. It is considered one of the best tufa formations in the eastern United States. Similar to stalagmites in caves, tufas are formed when minerals within dripping water are deposited on a surface. Travertine is the primary mineral composing this tufa. The formation is 61 feet high and 8-12 feet in diameter. The rich flora, ravines, cliffs and waterfalls of Floracliff make it one of the more scenic areas in central Kentucky."

Upcoming events at Floracliff include:

March 7: Volunteer Day - in which volunteers from the public are invited to assist in removing exotic and invasive plant species from the preserve.

March 28: Pollinators with Blake Newton - Kentucky Entomologist Blake Newton hosts an educational program about pollinators and their relationships with the spring wildflowers.

April 4: Medicinal Wildflowers with Ciara Lockstadt - Experience the spring wildflowers in bloom and learn about their historical and present day medicinal uses.

Geodes

Kentuckians have grown up around geodes their whole lives, and because of this, probably didn't realize that people in many areas have never heard of them.

That's because geodes, though distributed widely, are very concentrated in Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa and Missouri; probably for some of the same reasons that caves are so plentiful here. According to Wikipedia:

Geodes are essentially rock cavities or vugs with internal crystal formations or concentric banding. The exterior of the most common geodes is generally limestone or a related rock, while the interior contains quartz crystals and/or chalcedony deposits. Other geodes are completely filled with crystal, being solid all the way through. These types of geodes are called nodules.

An eBay seller by the name of Miranda8912, based out of Liberty, KY, always has an interesting and goodly assortment of these mysterious hollow crystalline rocks for sale, including ones that rattle. These are the ones that are most likely to have nice crystal structures inside.

The "Kentucky Anomaly"

This is apparently one of those things that tend to get buried and lost in the shuffle of mountains of government-generated paperwork and bureaucracy - check this out.

"A very prominent magnetic anomaly measured by MAGSAT over the eastern mid-continent of the United States was inferred to have a source region beneath Kentucky and Tennessee. Prominent aeromagnetic and gravity anomalies are also associated with the inferred source region."

Okay, so a huge magnetic anomaly under Kentucky is cool, and is right in line with everything I've been saying about the "Kentucky Vortex", the "Dark and Bloody Ground", and the old William S. Burroughs bit about old evils lurking under the soil. But gravity anomalies specifically under Kentucky? Damn! This is hardcore!

And of course, the first things that come to my mind are the stories about the ancient civilizations of people that were supposedly here before the Native Americans, and then I start thinking about why the Blue Grass Army Depot is said to be the Area 51 of Kentucky. (And then I start thinking about the guy who claims there was a UFO that crashed in Burnside, KY... but only for a moment.)

Could this "Kentucky Anomaly" be a sort of Unified Field Theory for everything that's weird about this area? I'm intrigued. They fed this anomalous data into a NASA computer and asked it to come up with a theoretical model that might explain the anomaly. As the NASA website tells it:

"A crustal model constructed to fit these anomalies interpreted the complex as a large mafic plutonic intrusion of Precambrian age. The complex was named the Kentucky body."

How X-Files is that? It's called "The Kentucky Body" and they don't know exactly what it is but they do know it's causing huge magnetic and gravity anomalies?

Did they really say "gravity anomalies"??? Yes, yes they did. Whoa.

Now I know the Pre-Cambrian era well - that's back in the old, old, times before everything. Actually, to call it an "era" is a misnomer - it actually comprises the entire first seven-eighths of the Earth's history, about which we know practically zip.

It's not just all about this "Kentucky Body" though: a subsequent report notes that "the source region for the satellite anomaly is considerably more extensive than the Kentucky body sensu stricto."

Aside from a mention in some grad student's online paper, I can't find any further analysis of the Kentucky Body and the Kentucky Anomaly by NASA (or anyone else) after this initial flurry of papers in the 1980s. Why? Did the subject become classified?