Geology of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

Geodiversity is the full range of a park's geologic resources — rocks, minerals, sediments, fossils, landforms and the processes that shape them — together with its soils. The National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas, produced by the Geologic Resources Inventory, collects that information for education, geoconservation and the joint management of each park's living and non-living resources.

Garrity's Alabama Battery overlooking Moccasin Bend, the Tennessee River and Chattanooga from Lookout Mountain. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The park

• Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park has 18 separate units along the Georgia–Tennessee border, in Catoosa, Dade and Walker counties, Georgia, and Hamilton County, Tennessee.
• It was established on August 19, 1890, as the first national military park, and covers about 3,673 hectares (9,078 acres).
• It preserves resources of the Civil War campaign for Chattanooga — the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga — and 12,000 years of human habitation on the Moccasin Bend peninsula.
• The Chattanooga campaign was one of the war's deciding campaigns: Union victories secured the "Gateway to the Deep South," hastening the end of the fighting and the reunification of the country. The park offers rare opportunities to study some of the war's most remarkable maneuvers and strategies.
• Moccasin Bend National Archeological District preserves evidence of American Indian life across the transitional Paleo-Indian/Archaic, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian and historic periods.

Geologic setting

The park lies in the southern Appalachian Mountains, in the Valley and Ridge province, and shares its geology with the wider Valley and Ridge and Appalachian Plateaus provinces. Its bedrock is mostly Paleozoic sedimentary rock, in long belts running northeast–southwest, the same direction as the province itself.

Chickamauga Battlefield

Mostly Ordovician carbonates:

Lookout Mountain Battlefield

A rich stack of layers from the Ordovician through the Pennsylvanian, folded into a broad syncline:

The Lookout Valley fault, a major structure, cuts across most of Lookout Mountain Battlefield and the Moccasin Bend National Archeological District.

Cannons and a split-rail fence on the battlefield. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Maps and reports

The Geologic Resources Inventory produces digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks. Its products for this park include scoping summaries (the mapping plan agreed by park staff and local geologists), digital geologic maps for GIS and Google Earth, a report on the park's setting, features, management issues and history, posters, and a project overview. A Soil Resources Inventory has also been completed. All are available through the NPS DataStore.

Sources

Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park, Georgia and Tennessee," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.