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Bison on the prairie above the cave.
Wind Cave National Park, on the southeastern edge of South Dakota's Black Hills about five miles north of Hot Springs, protects two landscapes stacked on top of each other: one of the longest, oldest and most complex caves on Earth, and above it one of the most intact prairies in North America. Both are products of the same geology.
The park in brief
| Established | January 9, 1903 — the first national park created to protect a cave |
| Size | about 33,924 acres (13,728 hectares), Custer County |
| First known | to Native Americans for thousands of years; to white settlers in 1881, when Jesse and Tom Bingham felt a strong wind blowing out of the cave's small natural entrance |
| Underground | boxwork — thin blades of calcite in a honeycomb — and calcite crystal formations, plus the remains of ancient caves filled with sediment |
| Above ground | bison, pronghorn, deer, elk, prairie dogs, mountain lions, and the endangered black-footed ferret |
The wind that gave the cave its name is the cave breathing: when air pressure outside falls, air rushes out of the entrance, and when it rises, air rushes in.
How the Black Hills were made
The Black Hills are a long dome pushed up across some two million acres of the South Dakota–Wyoming border, mostly between about 60 and 50 million years ago, during the mountain-building episode geologists call the Laramide orogeny. As the dome rose, erosion stripped the younger rock off its top and exposed a core of very old Precambrian rock.
| Layer | Age | At Wind Cave |
|---|---|---|
| Crystalline core | Paleoproterozoic, about two billion years | quartzite, metapelite and the Harney Peak Granite — the same granite the presidents are carved in at Mount Rushmore |
| Sedimentary rocks | Cambrian to Cretaceous | widely spread across the park, tilted to dip away from the centre of the Hills |
| Cave rock | Mississippian | the Pahasapa Limestone, in which both Wind Cave and nearby Jewel Cave formed |
Wind Cave and Jewel Cave share one regional history, and both are mostly carved in that limestone. The park sits in the Great Plains physiographic province, whose rocks and history reach well beyond its boundary.
What protects it
Fossils in national parks are protected by the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009. Collecting rocks, minerals or fossils in the park is not allowed.
Maps and reports
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory, which maps and describes the geology of more than 270 parks, has published for Wind Cave:
- a scoping summary — the record of the meeting where Park Service staff and local geologists planned the mapping;
- digital geologic maps for GIS software, with a user guide;
- a geologic report on the park's setting, features, management issues and history, with a map poster;
- a soil survey, from the Soil Resources Inventory.
All are free on the NPS DataStore.
Sources
Written from "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota", National Park Service Geologic Resources Division, a work of the United States government in the public domain, which cites Palmer et al. (2016) and Lisenbee and DeWitt (1993).
En estas coleccionesWind Cave National Park
Licencia: CC0 1.0 (dominio público) · Adaptado de www.nps.gov
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