Operated by Louisville Cement, then Essroc, then Italicementi, and now Heidelburg Cement; the cement production has stopped but the aggregate quarry mining the Louisville Limestone is still producing. It is a small hole in the now closed 1,200+ acre quarry. It bottoms in the Waldron Shale and goes through the Louisville Limestone (some call the upper layers the Wabash Formation) – all Silurian. The cement quarry mined the Devonian Jeffersonville Limestone, Speed Limestone (type locality), Sellersburg = North Vernon Limestone. The cap of New Albany Shale was waste rock.
Panorama of quarry from east side. I’m not as close to the highwall as it might seem.Fossil collecting above the quarry where the soil has been stripped for cement production.Weathered out horn corals dominated by Heliophyllum halliBranching coral Thamnoptychia alternans weathered out on residual soil (toe of shoe for scale)Corals collected from the residual soil – mostly from the Beechwood Limestone.Looking for fossils in an exposure of the Sellersburg = North Vernon Limestone.Chert residuum containing fossil brachiopods, trilobites, etc., from the Sellersburg Limestone.Collecting fossils in the Speed Limestone.Drilling below the New Albany ShaleSpiny Platyceras dumosum – eventually collected by Kenny PoppRupture in the floor of the quarry in the upper Louisville Limestone. This is nature relieving stress – not quarrying.Contact between the Silurian and Devonian limestones (light and dark layers). The contact is an unconformity with 30 million years of strata missing. Bag of Jeffersonville Limestone, Middle Devonian, corals collected from residual soil.A group of geologists collecting fossils out of the Waldron Shale pulled from the sump pit.A view of the sump pit from the top of the south wall.Sump pit in the Waldron Shale. Louisville Limestone is above it.
