Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1886 — Geology of Jasper. [ARTICLE]

Geology of Jasper.

EditPk Republican : * i- ■< A tew words of mine may be of interest anfl service to your readers of Rensselaer. I shall address them not in the language of science but in the word? of common life. Abstract sciences, however fertilizing to the mind, have but little interest to the general reader; And yet Jefferson Davis has told his countrymen, if countrymen he has. one truth. It is this: That every intelligent man should know something about the features, botanical and geological, of his own town or' county. Every business man of intelligence must know something about the resources of his town as determined by thcSe features. It s obvious to every observer that this section of Indiana has not long beed reclaimed from the water. Your streams are young. The Iroquois has not age enough to have sculptured a valley. It reminds me a little of the Piatte. which from Denver to Plattsmouth. on the Missouri, (wriggles along on the surface and has cut neither valley nor canyon. The Iroqueis has made itself as the “Makemself” ditch is now making itself* in Rensselaer. The rocks exposed on its banks dip at a slight angle. They have risen from the bed of an ocean but the movement was not violent. They were once a coral reef. “Life in rare and beautiful forms” was sporting here on the shallow bed of a tropical sea. The wrecks of that old life made your limestone. It is of the geologic age called “Devonian.” It belongs to the subdivision called “Hamilton.” This Hamilton limestone is olit'erous. It is the oil horizon ih Canada. In Rensselaer it is saturated with rock oil. Every well which pierces it is oily. But no well in Rensselaer which terminates in this limestone can yield oil or gas in paying quantity. An oil rock, to be productive, must not crop, it must be covered by shale. A system of sand stone, called in Indiana the “knob stone” crops to the south and east of Rensselaer. It is the lowest member of the carboniferous system and is equivalent to the “Berea grit” which is the source of oil and gas iu eastern Ohio. Here it is barren. It. caps the limestone. It is an outlier of the coal system. It is the youngest rock in the county. The Rensselaer limestoneAs the oldest gh the surface. . A well was bored in Terre Haute to a depth of 1600 feet. At that depth the drill pierced the Hamilton limestone which forms the surface rock at Rensselaer. .The well yields about.twen'y th c barrels of oil per day. 1 find that thesui±dce shoM’ ofoilhere Bas induced n’en to bore but they stepped too soon. No oil or gas can be found here, in paying quantity, above that systeifl of blue limestone, called Jhe “Trenton. ” This lies more than a thousand feet below the surface of Jasper county It is the oil rock of Lima and gas rock of Findlay, Two of the conditions required for oil .or gas are present in Rensselaer. First is the presence below of olifei uus strata; second is the “OVgri'&ich strata of shale;-—A= third condition is required. An antiufliuaLaxis or’ folding of the strata. Such an' axis is ufit clearly revealed in Eens'clacr. I'lre structure may bo present but flic -rock exjibsuhes' are hardly sutii '.. nt to show i r .

W. D. GUÑING.