Excursions in Indiana Geology

Abstract

Indiana lies wholly within the Central Lowland Province and thus calls to mind widespread, thin, nearly flat-lying Paleozoic rocks, major unconformities, and extensive plains. These features express epeirogenic submergences of the central part of the continent, long periods of general stability, and, nevertheless, repeatedly interrupted episodes of sedimentation and landform sculpture. Outstanding among these episodes was continental glaciation that carried to the Ohio River. Receiving ice from two principal directions the State's surface nearly everywhere attests to its latest experience, most obviously in the form of a great till plain that is interrupted in its gross appearance by end moraines, valley trains, and ice-contact deposits. Structurally, the State lies athwart a broad crestal area, the Cincinnati Arch, which separates the Michigan Basin on the north from the Illinois Basin on the southwest. Some structural instability, manifest as long ago as Precambrian time, is evident in such sedimentational or second-rank structural features as lithofacies, Silurian-Devonian and Mississippian-Pennsylvanian unconformities that change both locally and regionally in magnitude, and faulting. The more recent erosional record reflects structural history as well, and Paleozoic rocks from middle Ordovician to middle Pennsylvanian in age crop out at the bedrock surface according to their order of superposition. The Paleozoic units west and south of the Cincinnati Arch have special interest on these excursions. Their truncated edges, having differing resistances, are expressed alternately by open vales of gentle relief and uplands consisting of partly dissected westward-facing dip slopes and rugged forested scarps. Within easy range of Bloomington we can demonstrate much of the variety of geologic form characteristic of the State. Crossing the regional strike and the boundary between driftless and glaciated areas, the first day's excursion (inside front cover) is generally eastward to traverse bedrock of Mississippian to Silurian age and drifts assigned to the Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsin Stages. It emphasizes the State's most widely known natural product, the Indiana Limestone, and relationships of physiography to bedrock and drift. The second day's excursion (inside back cover) is northwestward from Bloomington and crosses younger bedrock (to middle Pennsylvanian in age). It emphasizes the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian unconformity, stratigraphic relationships of drifts, and some of the newest methods of coal mining and land reclamation.