Three Caves EarthCache
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Three Caves, located at the base of Huntsville's Monte Sano Mountain, is a former quarry from which limestone was mined to use for roads for the growing city becoming known as "The Rocket City." Three Caves is now developing into a natural cave. It offers a glimpse into a unique geological window in time.
Features developing in the cave include baby stalactites and Cave Pearls. Bats have also made this cave home. This and other changes over time show that nature is making this old limestone quarry into a real cave.
As time goes by, Mother Nature is slowly reclaiming this space. Three Caves, with its porous limestone and Mother Nature’s help, behaves just like a normal cave in many ways. If you look way up, towards the top of the rear wall, you will see some shiny white streaks running down the wall. Rainwater picks up Carbon Dioxide from the air and dissolves more from organic debris as it percolates through the soil. It then becomes an acid, Carbonic acid.
When this acidic water seeps down through the soil and reaches the limestone rock beneath, it dissolves some of the limestone, which is chemically known as calcium carbonate. The Calcium laden water migrates further down through cracks in the rock known as “joints”. As this water emerges from the joints into a void, such as a tunnel or this cave, the Carbon Dioxide escapes back into the air. The remaining water is left supersaturated with Calcium Carbonate. That is, it contains more calcium Carbonate than it can hold in the water. Some of it precipitates out, or hardens, as rock. This particular form of Calcium Carbonate is called “flowstone”. Stalactites, stalagmites, columns, etc. as found in all caves, are all different forms of flowstone. This flowstone is, chemically, the very same as limestone.
HISTORY
Three Caves is a former limestone mine. The mine began operating on a small basis in the spring of 1945. The site of Three Caves was owned by Madison County and leased to Madison Limestone Company for five cents per ton of limestone hauled away.
After the war ended, the demand for limestone for construction increased for a fast-growing Huntsville. At its height, the quarry spawned tons of limestone that paved the majority of Huntsville's original main streets and parking lots. The Three Caves Quarry eventually closed due to skyrocketing operation costs and the growth of Huntsville. Open pit mining was more efficient, and a mining operation in the middle of town was unsafe for obvious reasons.
Madison County designated Three Caves as a fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since the 1980's, Three Caves has been used as a movie backdrop for films including "Ravagers," starring Richard Harris and Ernest Borgnine (using about 350 Huntsville residents as extras) and "What Waits Below" with Timothy Bottoms, as well as a rock video by "Kansas." The locally produced "Like Moles, Like Rats" also prominently features Three Caves. The former quarry was donated to The Land Trust of Huntsville & North Alabama in 1989.
Huntsville, Alabama is reviving Cold War era bomb shelters as part of a post-9/11 plan to provide protection against a possible terrorist attack. As fallout shelters go, the Three Caves Quarry just outside downtown offers the kind of protection that would make Dr. Strangelove proud, with space for many people.
The limestone quarry has 10 acres of floor space covered with jagged rocks. Jet-black in places with a year-round temperature of about 60 degrees, it has a colony of bats living in its highest reaches and baby stalactites hanging from the ceiling.
*********LOGGING REQUIREMENTS*************
You must post a photo of yourself at the cave similar to the one in this cache listing. As usual, you must be holding your GPSr and we need to be able to identify it is you.
Also, do your homework and email me the answers to these questions:
1) What year did mining end?
2) How many people could use the caves as fallout shelters all at once?
3) How deep is the cave from front to back?
4) How high is the ceiling?
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Treasures
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