Abstract The best public access to quarries from which the noted Indiana Limestone (trade name) is produced is at a park and demonstration center in the NE¼NW00BC;Sec.33, T.6N., R.1W., Lawrence County, Indiana (Oolitic 7½-minute Quadrangle), and lies 1 mi (1.6 km) north of Oolitic, which is, in turn, some 3 mi (4.8 km) north of Bedford, the county seat of Lawrence County (Fig. 1). The site may be reached by passenger car or bus. Visitors approaching from the south by 4-lane Indiana 37 should pass the turnout to the north part of Oolitic and proceed 2.3 mi (3.7 km) to Trogden Lane, turning right (east) there and passing through Needmore to the old 2-lane route of Indiana 37(1.2 mi [1.9 km]). Turn right (southeast) and proceed half a mile (0.8 km) to the entry for the Indiana Limestone Tourist Park and Demonstration Center. Visitors approaching from the north by Indiana 37 (4-lane)will pass a stoplight intersection with Indiana 45 at the southwest edge of Bloomington and proceed 7.7 mi (12.3 km) to the place where the road descends from the upland in a deep bedrock cut through the lower part of the Salem Limestone, the entire Harrodsburg Limestone and Ramp Creek Formation, and the upper few feet of the Borden Group (Middle Mississippian). The highway crosses Clear Creek about 0.3 mi (0.5 km) south of the cut, and 2.2 mi (3.7 km) south of the bridge the new highway intersects old Indiana 37 at a blinker light. Turn left

ABSTRACT The Mitchell Plateau of south-central Indiana is one of the iconic karst landscapes of the United States. The sinkhole-dimpled forests, fields, and farms; the extensive cave systems; and the deep windows into the groundwater system have fostered curiosity, exploration, and publication since the mid-1800s. This paper is designed to complement a field excursion to the classic features of this landscape. Included are literature reviews focused on three karst basins of the Mitchell Plateau: Mill Creek–Mosquito Creek, Bluespring Caverns, and Lost River. Geomorphic, hydrologic, and geochemical data are synthesized in the modern context of our understanding of epigenetic karst. Revealed are three styles of karst basin: (1) small, shallow karst aquifers strongly controlled by meteoric recharge and epikarst percolation; (2) intermediate-size karst aquifers with significant base flow and surface-water–groundwater interaction; and (3) regional aquifer systems with outcrop belt recharge, downdip transport into confinement with long water-rock interaction times, and artesian flow or entrainment of mineralized waters through fractures into springs or surface waters. Quaternary glaciation has greatly influenced the vertical position of base level through river incision and sediment aggradation; conduit development is controlled by proximity to the major rivers and the stratigraphic position of conduits.

ABSTRACT The historic town of New Harmony is located along the Wabash River in Posey County, Indiana, and served as a focal point for natural scientists, especially geologists, in the early nineteenth century. Notable geologists that lived and worked in New Harmony during this time include Edward Travers Cox, William Maclure, Fielding Bradford Meek, Joseph Granville Norwood, David Dale Owen, Richard Dale Owen, Benjamin Franklin Shumard, Gerard Troost, and Amos Henry Worthen. Other natural scientists who worked in New Harmony include Charles Alexandre Lesueur and Thomas Say, and the town was also visited by James Hall, Leo Lesquereux, Sir Charles Lyell, and Alexander Philipp Maximilian, Prince of Wied. The purpose of this field-trip guide is to highlight the scientific and geologic enterprise that operated in nineteenth-century New Harmony, Indiana. There will be a tour of historic buildings including laboratories used by David Dale Owen, such as the Rapp-Owen Granary and his fourth laboratory, which was constructed in 1859. Furthermore, field-trip participants will visit a new geology exhibit at the Working Men’s Institute, an organization established by William Maclure in 1838. The field excursion will also visit historically significant localities, including Mississippian and Pennsylvanian exposures, the type section of the West Franklin Limestone, and a Pennsylvanian paleobotanical site that yielded extensive collections of plant fossils in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, this field trip will provide an opportunity to discuss the importance of art to geological studies in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, hand-colored geologic maps, cross sections, and renderings of fossils were included with many of the scientific reports of historic New Harmony, and are reflected by the superb artwork of Charles Alexandre Lesueur, David Dale Owen, and Thomas Say. Access to view their original scientific artwork is possible only through special arrangement with the Working Men’s Institute.

Abstract The lower Pennsylvanian strata in Indiana, Illinois, and western Kentucky rests unconformably on Mississippian to Devonian deposits within the midcontinent Illinois Basin. These deposits fill a complex drainage network of sub-Pennsylvanian paleovalleys with as much as 140 m of shale, sandstone, coal, and mudstone. Paleovalley widths are variable ranging from a kilometer to several kilometers wide and trend roughly northeast to southwest. Timing of valley incision is difficult to constrain and may have been diachronous. Filling of the southern reaches of the drainage system commenced during earliest Pennsylvanian while incision may have continued in the more northern (upland) reaches in Indiana. The paleovalleys progressively filled from south to north during an overall transgressive sea-level rise. During sea-level rise, these valleys became the sites for estuarine deposition. Two relatively small paleovalleys (1 to 1.5 km wide) have been studied in detail in south-central Indiana. Lithofacies can be mapped down the valleys for several kilometers by using subsurface and outcrop data. Within these valleys, conglomerate and conglomeratic sand-dominated inner (upper) estuarine, mud-dominated estuarine central basin, and sand-dominated outer (lower) estuarine deposits can be identified. Central basin sediments overlie fluvial deposits. Direct evidence of tidal influence within the central basin deposits can be recognized by the presence of intertidal rhythmites that exhibit well developed neap-spring cycles. Outer estuarine deposits overlie the central basin deposits and accumulated during the final stages of valley-filling.

ABSTRACT The Salem Limestone (Valmeyeran, Mississippian) is a preeminent dimensional limestone quarried in a two-county area of south-central Indiana for nearly 200 years. Advances in quarry technology in the past 30 years produce nearly smooth-sawn quarry walls that show the exquisite depositional details of the Salem carbonate shoal. The Salem shoal is part of a large-scale shoaling sequence that produced a carbonate platform during the middle Mississippian that began at the end of Borden Group (Mississippian) delta deposition and culminated with the deposition of the Ste. Genevieve Limestone (Mississippian). The Salem was deposited as a high-energy, but subtidal shoal above fair-weather wave base. Four environments are recognizable within the shoal: active shoal, open lagoon, intrashoal channel, and intershoal channel. A shoal crest environment may also be present as a fifth environment. A hierarchy of bounding surfaces can be defined using the sawed quarry exposures. First-order surfaces are foreset laminae and appear as inclined or horizontal stratification. Second-order surfaces are the contacts between similar bedforms, and third-order surfaces truncate first- and second-order surfaces, representing breaks in sedimentation. Combined they define mesoforms within the shoal complex. Fourth-order surfaces, similar to third-order surfaces, represent a change from a shoal to lagoonal setting. Evidence of hard-ground development occurs along third-order surfaces, associated with encrusting bryozoan holdfasts, corals, and columnar subtidal stromatolites. Tracing surfaces on the quarry walls is vital to reconstructing the internal architecture of the shoal and the processes that operated within it. We will examine this shoal architecture by visiting quarries and an outcrop, and we will visit a mill where quarried stone blocks are fabricated into panels and shapes for buildings.

Abstract Internal architecture, three scales of reservoir heterogeneity, and porosity-permeability compartments can be reconstructed for Middle Mississippian Salem Limestone reservoirs of the Illinois Basin by integrating bedform architecture, depositional fabrics, and trends of porosity development. In sawed quarry walls of south-central Indiana, excellent exposures of the Salem Limestone allow detailed mapping of a wide range of bedforms representative of an extremely dynamic hydrographic regime similar to that of the shoreface zones of siliciclastic shelves. Echinoderm- and bryozoa-rich grainstones and fossiliferous oolitic grainstones are the predominant depositional facies and were deposited as subtidal shoals in an upper shore-face setting. Vertical and spatial relationships of facies and bedforms reveal hierarchies of depositional units and bounding surfaces that have been used to reconstruct four architectural packages (AP’s) of the scale of mesoforms. AP-I is a channelized mesoform that defines a NNE-SSW intrashoal channel. AP-II is a large storm-deposited sandwave complex that filled the channel. AP-III is a dark-gray grainstone/packstone that grades laterally into packstones and was deposited in a relatively low energy setting. AP-IV consists of oscillatory trough cross-stratified megaripples of oolitic grainstones. Numerous stylolites occur and add to the mesoscale heterogeneity. Together, microfacies, bedforms, and bounding surfaces compartmentalize porosity and permeability and lead to micro- and mesoscale heterogeneities within the mesoform scale architectural packages. Lessons learned from such outcrop models can be applied to the producing Salem reservoirs in the subsurface. Here, in the distal parts of the inner ramp, the shoal complex is even more compartmentalized because each AP is represented by a “complete” suite of upward-shallowing facies: a basal outer shelf sponge-spicular wackestone, a main shoal grainstone, and an overlying restricted marine lagoonal wackestone. When integrated with mercury-injection capillary-pressure and production data, these packages and respective scales of reservoir heterogeneity help delineate flow units for reservoir characterization and simulation purposes and determine how the reservoir facies will drain during primary and secondary recovery. The results can also be used to reduce uncertainty (geologic risk) during the pre-drill economic assessment, field appraisal, and development phases.