It was from these visits and checking physical features versus previous reports that they determined the natural modifications to the entrances of two caves. The authors updated the records and visited many of the caves, refining the previously reported locations with a Global Positioning System (GPS). In the historic reports, multiple names or index numbers were sometimes found for the same cave, or the same name and index number were applied to different caves. Indeed, there is a picture in the journal paper of a typical suburban yard, the homeowner standing next to a storm sewer culvert, which is the entrance to Fogelbach Cave.ĭuring the project, Criss and his associates located and examined the caves, wrote new reports for them and typed-up and entered all the preexisting reports into the Missouri Speleological Survey electronic database. Louis County's Metropolitan Sewer District even manages several caves as part of the sewer system that handles street runoff.
At least 24 caves have been obliterated or made into culvert entrances. They also found that a far larger number - greater than 10 percent - have been highly modified or obliterated by suburban expansion in the county. They found that the entrances to at least two caves have undergone significant natural modification from breakdown or landslide processes.
#THE LOST CAVES OF ST. LOUIS FULL#
Two of the longest caves, Cliff Cave and Cave of the Falls, both in the southeast part of the county, account for a full half of the aggregate length of all caves in the county.
The cave lengths, though, are exponentially distributed, with half of the caves less than 100 feet long.
Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the authors, using existing data of mostly paper documents, including maps - most between 20 and 50 years old, but some extending into the late 19th century - located many of the 127 caves, whose aggregate length is more than four miles. Farther north, outside Hannibal, who could forget Injun Joe's lingering death in the cave that was gated after Tom and Becky Thatcher became lost there? Louis area's population of approximately 2.7 million.Ĭaves in this karst region are legendary, having served over time as beer storage sites, ballrooms, taverns, speakeasies and disposal sites. Louis city - a county of 508 square miles with a population (2000 Census) of 1,016,315, comprising nearly one-third of the St. Osburn, studied most of the 127 reported caves in St. Criss and his collaborators, Washington University earth and planetary sciences graduate student Jennifer Lippmann and research colleagues Everett Criss and G.R. The loss of caves is not on anyone's radar screen, and I think it should be."Ĭaves are a feature of karst terrain, along with sinkholes, springs, and "losing" streams that disappear into "swallow holes" and resurface in other areas. There is no law in Missouri to protect caves on private land, and we don't seem to have any protocol as to what is acceptable. Louis County and elsewhere that we should try a little harder to protect our natural habitat.
"Caves have been discarded by developers with the same impunity as trees," said Criss. Louis County, Missouri, USA, says co-author Robert Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St.
#THE LOST CAVES OF ST. LOUIS MOVIE#
The latter is a tear-jerking novel, made into a movie by Clint Eastwood, about a doomed, unlikely love affair, a hallmark of the '90s with all the permanence of the Backstreet Boys.Ĭaves, though, are in trouble, at least in St. Louis County's 127 known caves and a warning that development over the past two centuries has eliminated or destroyed many caves in a state that could quite rightly call itself the Cave State. The former, a scholarly paper that appears as the sole entry of the journal Missouri Speleology (Vol. Louis County and the Bridges of Madison County share a common theme: loss.
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