Damascus Hydrosphere EarthCache
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(not chosen)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
This spring is close to the Appalachian Trail and the Creeper trail. This was the local water filling station, before water came into the area people would come by and park along the road with containers of every size to take home. Still to this day I have seen many people filling up gallon jugs and there water bottles to take on the road or trail. Also last year is the only time that people can remember the spring going dry.
Damascus Spring is located in a beautiful city of Damascus Virginia. Damascus Spring is actually the result of Karst topography which is common for the South West Virginia Mountains. Springs may be formed in any sort of rock. Small springs are found in many places. In South West Virginia, the largest springs are formed in limestone and dolomite in the karst topography of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Both dolomite and limestone fracture relatively easily. When weak carbonic acid (formed by rainwater percolating through organic matter in the soil) enters these fractures it dissolves bedrock. When it reaches a horizontal crack or a layer of non-dissolving rock such as sandstone or shale, it begins to cut sideways, forming an underground stream. As the process continues, the water hollows out more rock, eventually admitting an airspace, at which point the spring stream can be considered a cave. This process is supposed to take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to complete.
Spring (hydrosphere)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A spring is any natural occurrence where water flows onto the surface of the earth from below the surface, and is thus where the aquifer surface meets the ground surface.
Formation
A spring may be the result of karst topography. Where surface water has infiltrated the earth's surface (recharge area), becoming part of the area groundwater. The groundwater then travels though a network of cracks and fissures, openings ranging from intergranular spaces to large caves. The water eventually emerges from below the surface, in the from of a spring.
Forcing of the spring to the surface can be the result of a confined aquifer in which the recharge area of the spring water table rests at a higher elevation than that of the outlet. Spring water forced to the surface by elevated sources are artesian wells. This is possible even if the outlet is in the form of a 300 foot deep cave. In this case the cave is used like a hose by the higher elevated recharge area of groundwater to exit through the lower elevation opening.
Nonartesian springs may simply flow from a higher elevation through the earth to a lower elevation and exit in the form of a spring, using the ground like a drainage pipe.
Still other springs are the result of pressure from an underground source in the earth, in the form of volcanic activity. The result can be water at elevated temperature as a hot spring.
The action of the groundwater continually dissolves permeable bedrock such as limestone and dolmite creating vast cave systems.
A natural spring
Types of spring outlets
• Seepage or filtration spring. The term seep is usually springs with small flow rates in which the source water has filtered into permeable earth.
• Fracture springs, discharge from faults, joints, or fissures in the earth. In which springs have followed a natural course of voids or weaknesses in the bedrock.
• Tubular springs are essentially water dissolved and created underground channels, basically cave systems
Spring flow
Spring discharge, or resurgence is determined by the "spring's" recharge basin. Factors including the size of the area in which groundwater is captured, the amount of precipitation, size of capture points, and the size of the spring outlet. Water may leak into the underground system from many sources including permeable earth, sinkholes, and losing streams. In some cases entire creeks seemingly disappear as the water sinks into the ground via the stream bed. Grand Gulf State Park in Missouri is an example of an entire creek vanishing into the groundwater system. The water emerges nine miles away, forming some of the discharge of Mammoth Spring in Arkansas.
Classification
Springs are often classified by the volume of the water they discharge. The largest springs are called "first-magnitude," defined as springs that discharge water at a rate of at least 2800 Liters or 100 cubic feet (2.8 m3) of water per second. Some locations contain many first magnitude springs such as central Florida where there is 33[2] known to be that size and 11 known of, in the southern Missouri Ozarks and 11[3] in the Thousand Springs area along the Snake River in Idaho. The scale for spring flow is as follows:
Magnitude Flow (ft³/s, gal/min, pint/min) Flow (L/s)
1st Magnitude > 100 ft³/s 2800 L/s
2nd Magnitude 10 to 100 ft³/s 280 to 2800 L/s
3rd Magnitude 1 to 10 ft³/s 28 to 280 L/s
4th Magnitude 100 US gal/min to 1 ft³/s (448 US gal/min) 6.3 to 28 L/s
5th Magnitude 10 to 100 gal/min 0.63 to 6.3 L/s
6th Magnitude 1 to 10 gal/min 63 to 630 mL/s
7th Magnitude 1 pint to 1 gal/min 8 to 63 mL/s
8th Magnitude Less than 1 pint/min 8 mL/s
0 Magnitude no flow (sites of past/historic flow)
For credit you must email me the answers to the questions below, please do not put in your log:
Take a picture of you at the spring wit GPS.
What is the elevation of the spring?
What Magnitude is the spring from the pipe?
What type of spring is this?
FTF: mtmanva2
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
Loading Treasures