Wolf Rock, home to Maryland's best-known non-solutional cave, is an example of quartzite that has endured while Catoctin Mountain has weathered around it. On top of these, older, harder thrust sheets of metamorphic rocks from the Paleozoic give these mountains their well-defined crests and ridges. Here older limestone and dolomites from the Cambrian/Ordovician make an appearance, offering up a few caves in the Frederick/Middletown Valley vicinity. Several other limestone members exist (Tomstown and New Oxford), no caves have been located within these members.īlue Ridge & the Great Valley – the Blue Ridge rises up from the Piedmont just west of Frederick in the first of its two mountains, Braddock/ Catoctin. In the lowlands portion of the Piedmont (known as the Frederick Valley) caves are found in the Frederick Formation and Grove Limestone ( upper Cambrian and lower Ordovician, respectively). Exceptions in the uplands area include the Wakefield and Cockeystown marbles, which are known to include but a few caves. Piedmont Plateau – an area of gently rolling hills and flatlands, the Piedmont is home to only a few of Maryland's caves, as most of its members are unsuitable for their development or are largely hidden from view beneath surface settlement. Being able to identify the different types of rock that caves are likely to form in can provide a great deal of background into a cave's likely history, and thus these rock formations will be further discussed moving east to west across the state.Ĭoastal Plain – this is the area of Maryland extending from just west of the Chesapeake Bay to the Atlantic Ocean: Precambrian rocks are mostly overlain by gravel, silts, marls, and sands, and consequently no solutional caves are known to exist in this region of Maryland.
Precipitation and groundwater react with such rocks as dolomite, limestone, and marble, dissolving the rock and forming small fissures and chambers allowing more water to enter and the dissolve the carbonic rock. Underlying layers of carbonate rocks form much of Maryland's bedrock. Non-solutional caves are carved out by weathering and are typically of smaller size and of little interest to spelunkers. While Maryland may be smaller than many of its neighboring states containing larger numbers of caves, its geology likewise allows for the formation of caverns, most of which are hollowed out by chemical processes-these caves are known as solutional caves. Most of Maryland's caves occur in its three westernmost counties (Washington, Allegany, and Garrett). This definition has led the authors to include several shelter caves, fissures, and mines that in states with larger, more complex cave systems, might otherwise go unlisted. In Maryland, a cave is defined as any subterranean cavity large enough for a human to enter. It was not until the inception of this second project that areas west of Washington County were even thoroughly canvassed even after the conclusion of the Franz/Slifer survey, it was speculated that even more, undiscovered caves could still remain in more remote portions of the western counties, prompting the need for an additional version, but since that time there have been no additional state sponsored reports or surveys released to the public.
In the late 1960s the MGS sponsored another statewide survey, undertaken by Richard Franz and Dennis Slifer, and a second, expanded edition of Caves of Maryland was released in 1971. Following the release of the first edition of Caves of Maryland in 1950, several other attempts by various parties and interested groups have been made at expanding available information concerning Maryland's subterrain. After the release of these articles in 1946, a more comprehensive study was begun by William Davies, whose years of fieldwork led to the compilation of the premiere edition of Caves of Maryland in 1950.
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But information about Maryland caves was first gathered into a series of reports by Martin Muma in the mid-1940s, working under the MGS.
There are a number of sources about the topic area, including a reference book titled Caves of Maryland which was first released by the Maryland Geological Survey (MGS) in 1950. Maryland has numerous caves, with the greatest concentration in its western counties: Washington, Allegany, and Garrett. ( December 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations.
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