Occasional Papers - IGWS
Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/158
This series consists of small reports on research topics that were not expected to be re-examined. They were more inexpensively produced than special reports, owing to the more specialized subject matter. Henry H. Gray initiated this series in 1974, suggesting the benefit of a larger 8 ½” x 11” publication format (usually reserved for guidebooks) to display his research. Although occasional papers were initially produced in black and white using the Docutek process, the most recent versions were distributed digitally as downloadable PDFs. All required a full formal review.
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Item Pyrite in the Coxville Sandstone Member, Linton Formation, and its effect on acid mine conditions near Latta, Greene County, Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1976) Wiram, Vance P.Item Compressive strength of the Springfield Coal Member in Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2003) Sprouls, Eric P.Item Physical Testing Data for Indiana Limestone and Other Building Stone Materials: A Computer Database(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2001) Hasenmueller, Walter A.; Hill, John R.; Frushour, Samuel S.Item Trends in underground coal mining in Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1981) Harper, DenverItem Seismic modeling in the (t,p) domain(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1988) Rudman, Albert Julius; Frazer, Neil L.Item Proceedings of 18th Forum on Geology of Industrial Minerals (Theme: Construction Materials)(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1983) Ault, Curtis H.; Woodard, Gerald S.Development and enhancement of natural resources are mandatory for the economic and environmental health of a nation. While such resources as minerals or energy are developed locally, their benefits, and the benefits of the development, are dispersed over very large areas. Often, however, development of those resources is fought by limited-interest groups. Because the limited-interest groups are often able to stop or delay development of needed resources, the general public is often denied the resources at reasonable costs. Often a local environment may be "saved" by at a much greater dispersed environmental cost involving large areas and many people. The dispersed benefit riddle is: "When a political entity is evaluating whether or not to develop or improve a resource, how can we as a nation be sure that the dispersed benefits of use of that resource are adequately weighed in the final decision?" Most basic to solving the dispersed benefit riddle is education of the general public, but volume of education is not the answer; the quality of education is most critical. The education must be sufficiently technical so that people understand the relationships among resources, economics, and environmental matters. Difficult though the public education step is, that is only the beginning. Zoning ordinances and laws need to be adjusted so that the broad public interest is more clearly served. And finally, it would be most helpful if the local public, in whose jurisdiction materials are enhanced or extracted, could more clearly benefit from the resource management process. Not solving the dispersed benefit riddle could, in the long run, be damaging to the economics and environments of both the United States and the world.Item Proceedings of the 40th Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals (May 2-7, 2004, Bloomington, Indiana)(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2007) DeChurch, Deborah A.; Shaffer, Nelson R."The 40th Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals was held in Bloomington, Indiana, from May 2–7, 2004. This Proceedings volume includes 21 papers covering many aspects of industrial minerals, from petrology and geology to economics of production and new technologies: Sonic drilling technology: A look at a unique methodology for determining subsurface lithology, by Timothy J. Augustine; An introduction to diamond tools and their application in the stone industry, by Ken Barnes; Overview of reported water withdrawals by the mineral aggregate industry and the potential utilization of the discharged water for alternative needs, by Mark E. Basch; Microgravity: An Economical Tool for Delineating Voids, by Jeff Bray and J. David Scott; Engineering implications of petroleum contents and carbonate aggregate mineralogy, by L. Lynn Chyi, Harshad L. Pandit, and Robert Y. Liang; The relationship of unconformities to the genesis, alteration, and preservation of bauxite and high-alumina kaolin deposits in the Andersonville District, Georgia, by Mark D. Cocker; Public awareness and the status of industrial minerals in Alberta, by W. A. D. Edwards; Characterization of sand and gravel deposits using S-wave refraction surveys, by Karl J. Ellefsen and William H. Langer; Petrologic controls for fluorspar deposits at Okorusu, Namibia: Hydrothermal replacement of carbonatite, marble, and fenite, by Richard D. Hagni; The Cleves Tunnel, a rare extant example of the use of Buena Vista stone for a canal structure near Cincinnati, Ohio, by Joseph T. Hannibal and Richard Arnold Davis; The Euclid bluestone of northeastern Ohio: Quarrying history, petrology, and sedimentology, by Joseph T. Hannibal, Benjamin A. Scherzer, and David B. Saja; Teaching with tombstones: Geology at the cemetery, by Joseph T. Hannibal; Rare earths in selected U.S. defense applications, by James B. Hedrick; Karst problems in mining of salt deposits in the United States, by Kenneth S. Johnson; Geologic context for industrial minerals of the midwestern United States, by Brian D. Keith; Evaluation of the sodium-sulfate soundness test for qualifying dolomites of northern Arkansas for construction aggregate, by Stephen W. Kline, Wipavan Phiukhao, Melanie L. Griffin, and J. William Miller; Accelerated weathering of limestone for CO2 mitigation: Opportunities for the stone and cement industries, by William H. Langer, Greg H. Rau, and Ken Caldeira; Industrial clays of the midwestern United States, by Haydn H. Murray; The life and times of the Indiana Limestone Institute, by Jim Owens; Recent trends in the industrial mineral and fuel industry of Indiana, by Kathryn R. Shaffer and Nelson R. Shaffer; Ohio's industrial minerals in the twenty-first century, by Mark E. Wolfe;and abstracts of other presentations (posters and talks for which no papers were submitted)."Item The Quality of Indiana's Coal Resources(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1994) Hasenmueller, Walter A."Planning for the use of Indiana's coal resources requires accurate and concise information about the quality of those resources. This report provides convenient summaries of Indiana coal quality that can be used to evaluate the character of Indiana's coal resources and to estimate the quantity of resources that meet quality standards based on long proximate analytical characteristics. The coal resources of Indiana are divided into eighteen separate resources in this report. Each resource is a coal bed or group of coal beds of economic or stratigraphic importance. Brief descriptions summarize the distribution, character, and mining patterns of each resource. The long proximate analytical characteristics of each resource are summarized on an as-received, moisture-free, and moisture-ash-free basis using thickness-weighted descriptive statistics and cumulative plots of each analytical characteristic versus percent of the resource. Characterization of ash fusion is limited to the temperature range for each fusion state owing to limitations of the fusion data."Item Underground Mines in the Hymera Coal Member (Pennsylvanian) of Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1994) Harper, Denver"INTRODUCTION: In Indiana almost 90 million tons of coal has been produced by underground mining from the Hymera Coal Member of the Dugger Formation (Pennsylvanian). From 1903 to 1927, more than 1million tons were produced annually from the Hymera (referred to historically as Indiana Coal VI). Production declined drastically during the Great Depression, but there was a revival of underground mining from 1942 to 1962. Little underground mining of the Hymera has been undertaken since 1962, but surface mining, which now dominates the state's coal industry, has drawn heavily from the reserves of that coal bed. This report is based chiefly on drilling records, mine maps, and geologic mining literature in the files of the Indiana Geological Survey. Attention is focused on geologic conditions encountered within now-abandoned underground mines and conditions that limited mining. Much of the text of this report has been taken from previous reports on coal mining in Sullivan and Knox Counties, Indiana (Harper, 1988a, and Harper and Eggert, in press), but this report contains additional maps and information about mining in the Hymera coal bed in Greene and Warrick Counties, and the maps of mining districts in this report are more detailed than those maps in the county reports. These maps provide the evidence that underground mining of the Hymera was limited by geologic conditions, such as split coal, geologic discontinuities referred to as ""rolls,"" and high-ash and possibly high-sulfur coal that was often associated with abnormal thickness of the coal bed. In contrast with some other commercially important coal beds, thin coal (less than 4.5 feet) does not appear to be the primary importance of coal bed thickness to mining productivity, the potential for resumption of underground mining in the Hymera, given certain market changes or technological developments in coal processing and utilization, may be relatively great compared to some other Indiana coal beds. This report describes geologic problems encountered in underground mines of the Hymera coal bed; no attempt is made here to hypothesize geologic controls on the distribution of those problems or to produce predictive models of their occurrence. This is the second in a series of reports; the first dealt with underground mines in the Survant Coal Member of the Linton Formation (Harper, 1988b). Subsequent reports will describe underground mines in the Seelyville Coal Member of the Staunton Formation and the Springfield Coal Member of the Petersburg Formation."Item Exposures of Silurian Reefs in Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1992) Ault, Curtis H."Numerous Indiana geologists, quarries, and others have searched for, admired, photographed, climbed, sampled, drilled, cored, analyzed, and mined the exposed Silurian reefs of Indiana. From before 1862, when Richard Owen described the curious tilted outcrops of reefal limestone in several places in northern Indiana, pioneer geologists and others speculated on the origin of the reefs with ideas of structural deformation, arches, false bedding, and even volcanism. These imaginative ideas were generally set to rest in 1928 (Cumings and Shrock, 1928a, 1928b). Since then much more has been learned about the reefs (Shaver, 1991), numerous additional reefs have been discovered (Ault and others, 1976, 1992), and their practical usefulness for many chemical and physical products has expanded dramatically. From early pioneer times, quarries in northern Indiana, especially in the Wabash Valley, mined the reefs for roadstone and railroad ballast and burned the stone to make lime for mortar, agricultural lime, and whitewash. The reef rock was also used with other Silurian carbonate rock for foundation stone, flagging, and building stone."Item Geologic Framework of the Aquifers in the Kankakee River Lowland(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1991) Bleuer, Ned K.; Fraser, Gordon S."The Kankakee River lowland is an intermorainic trough bounded by the Valparaiso Moraine on the north and the Iroquois Moraine on the south. It consists of three principal terrains: (1) the Kankakee River floodplain; (2) the Fair Oaks eolian plain; and (3) the Knox lowland between the northeast terminus of the Iroquois Moraine and the Maxinkuckee Moraine to the east. The sediments of the Kankakee River lowland are divided into four assemblages based on areal distribution, stratigraphic relationships, and genetic associations. They include: (1) alluvial and eolian sands, organic mud and sand, and peat of the Kankakee-Valparaiso assemblage; (2) till, lacustrine mud, and minor sand and gravel of the Snider assemblage; (3) basal and ablation till, and sand and gravel of the Trafalgar assemblage; and (4) a heterogenous group of sediments grouped into a pre-Snider assemblage, except where the occurrence of distinctive lithologies allows a more detailed stratigraphic definition. The principal aquifer in the Kankakee River lowland is the fluvial and eolian sands of the Kankakee-Valparaiso assemblage that occur at or near the surface throughout the lowland. Sand and gravel bodies in the pre-Snider Assemblage occur in bedrock valleys under the lowland, and small scattered bodies of sand and gravel in the Trafalgar and Snider assemblages of the Iroquois Moraine may also serve as aquifers."Item Geologic Framework of the Aquifers of the Valparaiso Moraine(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1991) Bleuer, Ned K.; Fraser, Gordon S."SUMMARY: The Valparaiso Moraine is an arcuate ridge at the south end of Lake Michigan that marks a terminal position of the ice of the Lake Michigan glacial lobe during the late Wisconsinan. The ridge consists of a western sector composed primarily of till at the surface, and an eastern sector consisting of a sandy outwash plain with significant deposits of till only along its northern margin. The materials of the moraine consist of (1) dense, silty clay loam deposited directly from glacial ice; (2) silty and sandy loam deposited by mudflows moving off the ice; (3) gravels rich in black-shale clasts deposited in channels near the ice margin and as subaqueous depositional lobes in a large proglacial lake; (4) silt and clay loam deposited as lacustrine muds; and (5) quartzose sands deposited on the outwash fan and in channels. The quartzose sands are widespread and form the principal aquifer of the complex. The sands are thinnest along the southern margin of the ridge and thicken substantially northward. They are very thick in the eastern part of the complex, where they form the bulk of the outwash fan. They also occur extensively under a thick till layer in the western part, and they are locally very thick in channels where they are interbedded with shale-rich gravels."Item Land-based Vibracoring and Vibracore Analysis: Tips, Tricks, and Traps(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1991) Baedke, Steven J.; Miller, Charles S.; Thompson, Todd Alan; Thompson, Linda D. P.; Doss, Paul K."INTRODUCTION: Vibracorers have seen increasing since they were introduced in the 1960's. Once a tool of research vessels and institutions along ocean coastlines (Pierce and Howard, 1969; Lanesky and others, 1979; Hoyt and Demarest, 1981; Finkelstein and Prins, 1981), small, portable vibracorers are now used on coastlines throughout the world and in many nonmarine settings (Smith, 1984). Their proliferation is a result of the vibracorers' low construction, field cost, and portability, the relatively undisturbed samples they obtain and moderate depths to which they penetrate. Most vibracorers are based on the design of Lanesky and others (1979) and Finkelstein and Prins (1981). Both designs use a concrete vibrator to set up an oscillation in a piece of aluminum irrigation pipe. The base of the core tube liquifies the underlying sediment, and the core tube sinks into the ground under its own or added weight. All vibracoring systems require the water table to be at or near the ground surface. Consequently, most vibracorers are used at the margins of water bodies, and in or near wetlands along floodplains and coasts. Personnel at the Indiana Geological Survey (IGS) have used a vibracorer since 1985. More than 200 cores have been collected in coastal, fluvial, and wetland sediments of northwestern Indiana. The cores constitute a valuable data set for describing the shallow subsurface geology of the area and determining the depositional history of Lake Michigan (Thompson, in press). Other cores of slurry-pond sediments have been collected in southwestern Indiana. There, the vibracorer was used to sample fine-grained coal refuse and to install shallow monitoring water wells. This paper describes the IGS vibracorer and vibracoring techniques. Most vibracorers can collect an undisturbed sample of a variety of sediment types, including sand, silt, and peat, in a range of depths from 10 to 25 feet. Problems encountered with vibracorers (poor penetration and recovery) can be overcome. We present numerous tips and pitfalls in constructing a vibracorer and maximizing core recovery."Item Reference Core and Correlation of Key Beds in the Petersburg and Linton Formations (Pennsylvanian) in Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1991) Hasenmueller, Walter A.; Ault, Curtis H."The Indiana Geological Survey recovered a nearly continuous core from a location near the type locality of the Survant Coal Member of the Linton Formation. This core spans a stratigraphic interval within the Desmoinesian Series extending from rocks immediately above the Houchin Creek Coal Member of the Petersburg Formation to an unnamed shale in the Staunton Formation immediately below the Seelyville Coal Member. This core is herein designated a reference core for the Houchin Creek Coal Member of the Petersburg Formation; the Survant Coal, Velpen Limestone, Mecca Quarry Shale (new name), and Colchester Coal Members of the Linton Formation; the Seelyville Coal Member of the Staunton Formation; and the boundary between the Petersburg and Linton Formations."Item Coalbed Methane in Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 1991) Harper, DenverMethane is a tasteless, odorless, invisible, combustible gas (chemical formula: CH4) that occurs naturally in certain rock strata, including almost all coalbeds... The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of what presently is known (and not known) about methane in Indiana's coalbeds.Item Carl B. Rexroad: Reminiscence of a long career in conodont biostratigraphy and a bibliography of his published works(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2017) Steinmetz, John C.Item Corebook of Carbonate and Associated Rocks in Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2015) Keith, Brian D.; Thompson, Todd AlanItem Evaluating thermal maturity using transmitted light techniques: Color changes in structureless organic matter and palynomorphs(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2016) Drobniak, Agnieszka; Hampton, LaBraun; Mastalerz, MariaProgressive color changes were observed in immature to postmature shale samples from various ages (Silurian to Tertiary) and geographic locations. The thermal alteration index, assessed based on the color of structureless organic matter, along with the spore color index determined on palynomorphs, were compared with vitrinite reflectance values obtained from more than 200 samples. While some correspondence occurs, the resolution of the thermal alteration index and the spore color index is not as precise as changes in vitrinite reflectance, as was expected. The 138 photomicrographs of structureless organic matter and palynomorphs included in this paper can serve as a color reference for the various stages of maturity.Item Conodont paleontology of the Alum Cave Limestone Member of the Dugger Formation (Pennsylvanian, Desmoinesian) in the eastern part of the Illinois Basin(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2016) Brown, Lewis M.; Rexroad, Carl Buckner; Zimmerman, AlexThe major purpose of this study of the conodonts of the Alum Cave Limestone Member of the Dugger Formation in Indiana is to enhance understanding of Desmoinesian (Pennsylvanian) biostratigraphy and paleoenvironments in the Illinois Basin. We collected samples from 25 localities in Gibson, Greene, Knox, Perry, Posey, Sullivan, Vanderburgh, and War-rick Counties in southwestern Indiana. A thin unnamed dark gray to black shale generally, but not uniformly, separates the Alum Cave stratigraphically from the underlying Springfield Coal Member of the Petersburg Formation. Idiognathodus, primarily juveniles, domi-nates the conodont fauna. Hindeodus and Neognathodus are uncommon. Adetognathodus and Idioprioniodus are rare. Notably absent are Diplognathodus, Ubinates, and Gondolella.Item Sedimentology, geochemistry, and paleobiology of a Pennsylvanian marginal marine depositional environment, Mansfield Formation, Indiana(Indiana Geological & Water Survey, 2013) Eble, Cortland; Elswick, Erika; Hasiotis, Stephen; Johnson, Claudia; Kauffman, Erle; Simonelli, Glenn