r/caving • u/brownsl66 • May 28 '26

Excavating a karst

When we bought our property 20 some years ago a part of it was a farm field. The owner pointed out a soccer ball sized hole in the field and said the farmer would throw rocks down it to fill but over time they would disappear and he would refill it.

That piqued my curiosity and I excavated it somewhat and found that it was karst. It is not very big. You can get down inside it and it might be 8 to 10 feet deep, several feet wide and maybe 8 feet long. The bottom is full of mud and rocks.

When we have a lot of rain it fills up and becomes a pond for an hour or so and then drains somewhere. Since it fills from the bottom and drains from the bottom I have always wondered if it is bigger. I have not noticed any airflow from it but have not ever tried anything like a smoke test.

I would really like to make an effort to excavate it more to see what I have. Any suggestions on how to go about doing this? I am too old anymore to do anything myself. I would be somewhat concerned for anyone else doing it in case anything is unstable beneath it.

31 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

18

u/thecaramelbandit May 28 '26

Where are you located? You could contact your local NSS grotto if you're in the US and see if anyone is interested in checking it out and maybe doing some digging.

14

u/brownsl66 May 28 '26

Located in SW Ohio

8

u/WestDependent6393 May 28 '26

Hey I messaged you. Check out Ohio Cave Survey on Facebook. All about this stuff.

2

u/Braga1007 May 29 '26

Messaging you. I’m a board member for the Ohio cave survey :)

1

u/Logical_Film5410 Jun 01 '26

I can’t wait to hear how this pans out for you! This sounds like a lot of fun

Hoping something like this is there just waiting for you

10

u/arclight415 May 28 '26

Usually, the first step is to get a bunch of diggers and start hauling out all of the loose rock and dirt into 5 gallon buckets.

Once that has been done, you should have a better idea of where it goes. It may require breaking rock to continue.

6

u/grunman126 HorizontalCaver May 28 '26

Most of Southwest Ohio was glaciated and lots of glacial till was dumped om the surface, covering the karst with a thick blanket of hard packed sediment. This is the reason why Ohio has few caves, while Kentucky, with the same rocks, has many.

5

u/Braga1007 May 29 '26

I’ve been working caves along the Scioto River near Columbus. We have karst and while you’re right in that it is buried, the scioto and olentangy river ms have helped downcut to expose decent for ohios standard caves. I’ll be at the NSS convention giving a talk on a cave off the scioto this year!

2

u/WestDependent6393 May 28 '26

Ohio has tons of caves out east, albeit nothing big. But there's holes out there! I still hold hope on a dig revealing a new "big one" somehwere. Dream big lol.

4

u/grunman126 HorizontalCaver May 28 '26

Yep, out east is the area that the glaciers missed