August 2006 Activities Highlights

Kane County Receives Federal Grant for ISGS and ISWS Water Project

At a press conference held in Sugar Grove, Illinois, on August 10, 2006, House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced a federal grant of $938,000 to assist an ongoing water resource study. Two ISGS staff members represented the Survey at the press conference. The ISGS and Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) are in the final year of a five-year study to evaluate the water resources of Kane County. The county is facing rapid growth. In 2000, the population of the county was approximately 404,000 and used 61 million gallons of water per day. By 2030, the population of the county is projected to be 692,000 people who are projected to need an additional 60 million to 80 million gallons per day.

The general objective of the investigation is to provide Kane County with a scientific basis for developing policies and management strategies for its water resources. To help meet this objective, the ISGS has developed a three-dimensional geologic model of Kane County and the surrounding area. The model has been used to produce maps of major Quaternary aquifers, aquifer sensitivity, and shallow bedrock geology. Preliminary versions of these maps have been published and delivered to the county. Final versions of the maps are scheduled to be released in April 2007. In addition, the geologic model has been incorporated into a groundwater flow model by the ISGS. The groundwater flow model will allow estimations of the availability of water from Quaternary and shallow bedrock aquifers in the county. The ISWS has also developed a regional groundwater flow model that will allow an estimation of availability of groundwater from the deeper bedrock aquifers. (Contact: W. Dey)

Environmental Planning Begins on Major Chicago Transportation Project

The ISGS participated in a review meeting for the large urban-corridor project to relieve congestion on Cicero and Harlem Avenues, two major traffic arteries in Chicago. The Illinois Department of Transportation project will involve extensive reconstruction of the Central Avenue-Narragansett Avenue corridor as well as significant work in the major rail yards in this area. Preliminary design alternatives and corridors had earlier been selected based on environmental work done by ISGS in 2002; the project now is moving toward specific designs and detailed environmental work. At the meeting, designs and scopes of work were reviewed, and plans for conducting the remaining environmental work were outlined. Field work on the project will begin as soon as the project design is finalized. (Contact: G. Kientop)

Preparations for Central United States Earthquake Exercise

At a meeting in Fairview Heights, Illinois, on July 17 to 19, 2006, an ISGS engineering geologist presented an hour-long introduction to earthquakes in the Central United States and their impacts. He presented information on historical events and related damage that occurred in various states. He also provided responders with a picture of what they might expect to encounter after a major earthquake. He showed the locations of soils that amplify ground motions and thus cause larger amounts of damage and indicated what damage might look like for buildings, roads, railroads, pipelines, electric power equipment, oil and water storage tanks and what dangers aftershocks might present. This meeting was conducted by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in preparation for the two-week-long earthquake exercise, Spill Of National Significance (SONS), scheduled for June 2007. This meeting brought together 110 representatives from federal and state Environmental Protection Agencies; Coast Guard; federal, state and local emergency managers; state health departments; state agriculture departments; and pipeline and refinery companies from Illinois and Missouri. The June 2007 exercise will have a series of New Madrid earthquakes produce spills of national significance from pipelines that cross the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. (Contact: R. Bauer)

Southwestern Illinois Cave Deposits May Hold Evidence for Past New Madrid Seismic Zone Earthquakes

Predictions of seismic activity along the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) require an accurate reconstruction of paleoseismic history. Considering the devastating effect of the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquake on the central midwestern region, finding different types of evidence for establishing earthquake periodicity is very important. Ongoing research on cave deposits in southwestern Illinois by the ISGS and the University of Illinois Geology Department, beginning in 2001, has shown that these underground deposits may be a unique and unexpected repository for such records. Geological features found in two southwestern Illinois caves, located within 250 km of the NMSZ and within 150 km of the epicenter of the 1811-1812 earthquakes, could be related to earthquake activity. There are five types of features: (1) stalagmites with deviated growth axes; (2) hundreds of relatively small, actively growing, white stalagmites growing on older, similarly sized stalagmites (4,000 to 5,000 years BP), on older flow stone, and on breakdown in both caves; (3) fallen soda straw stalactites from an isolated area in one of the caves; (4) collapse features that may have been triggered by seismic waves moving through thick, saturated cave sediments; and (5) a previously unrecognized feature in speleothems that is just beginning to be investigated. Each type of evidence, including collapse features, could provide temporal evidence of a seismic event. Scientists are still collecting, examining, and dating samples but have preliminary age results on the white stalagmites. Because of the similar morphology, appearance, and ages of the white speleothems, scientists propose that a single event initiated their growth. Two possible initiating events are (1) the rejuvenation of dormant speleothems resulting from the 1811-1812 NMSZ earthquake series by reopening former flow paths to the caves and (2) agricultural activities on the surface that began in the area in the early 1840s. More data need to be analyzed before conclusions can be reached. (Contacts: S. Panno, K. Hackley, and B. Curry)

Concrete from Fly Ash Research Generates Outside Interest

After reviewing the ISGS pamphlet entitled “Energy-Efficient Concrete from Fly Ash,” the president of an independent home construction firm in Massachusetts contacted Survey. The company president interviewed two ISGS researcher to discuss more details regarding to Survey’s fly ash building block program. She was impressed with the superior performance of the Survey’s fly ash products and plans to prepare a report based on the interview for submission to the legislators of Massachusetts and to Senator Clinton of New York. (Contact: J. Chou)

Preparations for Cave-In-Rock Field Trip Yield Interesting Findings

It was generally thought and reported in some literature that the iron ore used at the Illinois Iron Furnace was from the liesegang banding that occurs in the Pennsylvanian-age sandstones such as the Pounds or Battery Rock. While preparing for the upcoming geologic science field trip, an ISGS geologist found references that the ore was limonite, and that the limonite was mined near the Iron Furnace. During field work in the area, the geologist rediscovered the site of at least one of the old mining trenches and collected several examples of hematite with limonite staining. The old iron ore mining trench was along the Iron Furnace fault, a remarkable find since the mining and smelting of the ore at the Iron Furnace ended more than 150 years ago. The geologist also located the site of the area’s second iron furnace, called Martha. The Illinois Iron Furnace will be an historically interesting stop on the fall field trips, to be held September 23 and October 21, 2006. (Contact: W. Frankie)

Talk Given on Coal Bed Methane

An ISGS geologist presented a talk on coal bed methane at a large gathering of the Shelby County Farm Bureau in Herrick, Illinois, as part of a panel that included regulators of coal gas drilling from the Office of Mines and Minerals. An additional speaker was an attorney from the Illinois State Farm Bureau office. Of interest were the rights of coalbed methane drillers, land owners who do not own the mineral rights, and those who own the minerals. Illinois law gives each certain privileges and rights to compensation for surface damages. (Contact: D. Morse)

The ISGS Hosts Researchers from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

On July 20 and 21, 2006, the ISGS hosted researchers who are working on a zonal scheme to correlate Carboniferous rocks of the United States with their global equivalents. A miospore zonal scheme for western Europe has proved useful for correlation within Europe, and similar spore assemblages have been recorded from localities currently under study in the United States, particularly the Illinois Basin area. At the ISGS Geological Samples Library, researchers sampled several cores from different rock intervals within the Mississippian Subsystem. The succession of miospores gained from these rock core samples will be a major contribution to the current efforts to recognize the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian globally as subsystems of the Carboniferous System. At a finer scale, the results should provide a means of overcoming difficulties in the correlation of the regional composite stages and stage boundaries of the Carboniferous in Europe with the United States and the rest of the world (Contacts: R. Norby and Z. Lasemi)

Publications and Reports Released

Outside Publiations

Sahoo, G.B., C. Ray, E. Mehnert and D.A. Keefer, 2006, Application of artificial neural networks to assess pesticide contamination in shallow groundwater: Science of the Total Environment, 367(1), pp 234-251.

Report Archive