May 1, 2017 We left UC Clermont College at about 7:30 a.m. drove for about 12 hours to spend the night in Nebraska City, Nebraska.
We drove over I -275 to take I-71 to Louisville. Terrible storms and a number of accidents slowed traffic to a crawl and it took about 2 hours to get to Florence, KY.
We saw the familiar Ordovician alternating limestone and shale section exposed over the Cincinnati Arch. As we approached Louisville there were spectacular outcrops of massive beds of Mississippian limestone. The Ohio River was swollen by recent heavy rain so the fossiliferous limestone at the Falls of the Ohio were covered by water. After crossing the Ohio River and coming out of the valley exposures of the New Albany Shale (Ohio Black Shale in Ohio) outcropped along I-64. The New Albany is productive of gas and oil in the Illinois Basin in Indiana and Illinois. This unconventional reservoir/source rock is productive with horizontal drilling patterns and hydraulic fracturing. The shale is porous and holds economically viable volumes of oil & gas. It must be developed using state-of –the-art drilling and completion to enhance permeability so that petroleum can be transmitted through pores interconnected by fractures to the well bore and produced commercially. We were again seeing outcrops of Mississippian limestone as we approached Corydon, IN. We passed the large limestone quarry just west of Corydon and were observing dissolution of the limestone preferentially along joints, fractures, and bedding planes. Chemical decomposition of the limestone by weak carbonic acidic water. There are caves in the area, some commercial, and we observed sinkholes and karst topography features from the car windows.
We drove over I -275 to take I-71 to Louisville. Terrible storms and a number of accidents slowed traffic to a crawl and it took about 2 hours to get to Florence, KY.
We saw the familiar Ordovician alternating limestone and shale section exposed over the Cincinnati Arch. As we approached Louisville there were spectacular outcrops of massive beds of Mississippian limestone. The Ohio River was swollen by recent heavy rain so the fossiliferous limestone at the Falls of the Ohio were covered by water. After crossing the Ohio River and coming out of the valley exposures of the New Albany Shale (Ohio Black Shale in Ohio) outcropped along I-64. The New Albany is productive of gas and oil in the Illinois Basin in Indiana and Illinois. This unconventional reservoir/source rock is productive with horizontal drilling patterns and hydraulic fracturing. The shale is porous and holds economically viable volumes of oil & gas. It must be developed using state-of –the-art drilling and completion to enhance permeability so that petroleum can be transmitted through pores interconnected by fractures to the well bore and produced commercially. We were again seeing outcrops of Mississippian limestone as we approached Corydon, IN. We passed the large limestone quarry just west of Corydon and were observing dissolution of the limestone preferentially along joints, fractures, and bedding planes. Chemical decomposition of the limestone by weak carbonic acidic water. There are caves in the area, some commercial, and we observed sinkholes and karst topography features from the car windows.
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