File:Tubular passage (Gothic Avenue, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, USA) 1 (38378561732).jpg
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| Description |
Western Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave is the longest known cave on Earth, with over 412 miles of passages currently explored & mapped, as of fall 2017. The name “Mammoth Cave” does not refer to its world-record length, nor to the early discovery of mammoth or mastodon fossils here (actually, fossil proboscidean skeletal remains have been reported from this locality). Rather, the name refers to the immense size of many of the rooms and passages. It is not certain exactly when Mammoth Cave was discovered. A story about its 1797 discovery by a man named Houchins (or Hutchins) is fictional - the park service knows this, but still tells the story during cave tours. However, Mammoth Cave’s earliest acknowledgement in available historical records dates to 1797. Shown here is Gothic Avenue. This cave passage fascinates me, and yet it has been intensely vandalized - distressingly so (notice the smoke signatures on the ceiling). It could be characterized the same way as Michaelangelo's famous "Last Judgment" - a wrecked masterpiece (<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Last_Judgement_(Michelangelo).jpg/1200px-Last_Judgement_(Michelangelo).jpg" rel="nofollow">upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Last_Ju...</a>). Gothic Avenue is wider than it is tall, so is classified as a tubular passage. Such stretches of cave form in the phreatic zone - at or below the water table. A subterranean river used to flow through here. The picture is looking in the old upstream direction. Gothic Avenue is at level B in the Mammoth Cave system. Level B is the 2nd-oldest and the 2nd-elevationally highest set of passages. Level B passages started forming during the Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago. The walls and ceiling of Gothic Avenue are composed of limestones of the Paoli Member (= lower Girkin Limestone, lower Upper Mississippian). Locality: Gothic Avenue (looking upstream from near the mouth of the passage), Mammoth Cave Ridge, Mammoth Cave National Park, western Kentucky, USA |
| Date | |
| Source | Tubular passage (Gothic Avenue, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, USA) 1 |
| Author | James St. John |
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This image was originally posted to Flickr by James St. John at https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/38378561732. It was reviewed on 14 October 2019 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0. |
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| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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| current | 19:44, 14 October 2019 | | 4,000 × 1,991 (3.26 MB) | Ser Amantio di Nicolao (talk | contribs) | Transferred from Flickr via #flickr2commons |
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