Southern Prarie
I've always thought this little patch of land where Bernheim Forest's arboretum stands seemed out of place, a little piece of prairie in a patch of Kentucky hills. It turns out, Bernheim was strip mined once. This is reclaimed land. I never knew that as a kid.
The goal of the strip mining was iron ore. Now, I haven't done a thorough study of the geologic column here. I've observed in a very general sense what's above this elevation: limestone, shale, a very narrow bed of sandstone (which I observed only on a map and in the form of a single piece of float debris on the hillside), more limestone. Below this, I would only expect to find more interspersed limestone and shale for some indeterminably great depth, and you don't get a lot of iron ore in limestone. The shale's very dark, so maybe it's an unusually iron-rich shale. I guess if they were going for the shale, that would explain why they stopped at this particular elevation.
(Note: I'm figuring this out. I found a 1971 survey from the USGS suggesting this might be New Albany shale. The New Albany shale, according to this report, contains lot of pyrite. Pyrite is iron sulfide. If there's enough of it easy to get, it might be commercially valuable.)
Mining concerns are currently flattening vast stretches of Eastern Kentucky and the rest of the central Appalachians through the process of mountaintop removal, where they're taking out a bituminous coal bed. When they're done, they leave a flat stretch of fake prairie. It looks kind of like this, but not nearly so pretty.
Southern Prarie
I've always thought this little patch of land where Bernheim Forest's arboretum stands seemed out of place, a little piece of prairie in a patch of Kentucky hills. It turns out, Bernheim was strip mined once. This is reclaimed land. I never knew that as a kid.
The goal of the strip mining was iron ore. Now, I haven't done a thorough study of the geologic column here. I've observed in a very general sense what's above this elevation: limestone, shale, a very narrow bed of sandstone (which I observed only on a map and in the form of a single piece of float debris on the hillside), more limestone. Below this, I would only expect to find more interspersed limestone and shale for some indeterminably great depth, and you don't get a lot of iron ore in limestone. The shale's very dark, so maybe it's an unusually iron-rich shale. I guess if they were going for the shale, that would explain why they stopped at this particular elevation.
(Note: I'm figuring this out. I found a 1971 survey from the USGS suggesting this might be New Albany shale. The New Albany shale, according to this report, contains lot of pyrite. Pyrite is iron sulfide. If there's enough of it easy to get, it might be commercially valuable.)
Mining concerns are currently flattening vast stretches of Eastern Kentucky and the rest of the central Appalachians through the process of mountaintop removal, where they're taking out a bituminous coal bed. When they're done, they leave a flat stretch of fake prairie. It looks kind of like this, but not nearly so pretty.