earth science

Pipe Creek Sinkhole

Pipe Creek Sinkhole is a earth science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Pipe Creek Sinkhole rather than just read about it. In short: The Pipe Creek Sinkhole near Swayzee in Grant County, Indiana, is one of the most important paleontological sites in the interior of the eastern half of North America. It is preserved because it was buried by glacial till.

Key takeaways

Pipe Creek Sinkhole belongs to earth science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Pipe Creek Sinkhole to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Pipe Creek Sinkhole from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Pipe Creek Sinkhole near Swayzee in Grant County, Indiana, is one of the most important paleontological sites in the interior of the eastern half of North America. It is preserved because it was buried by glacial till. Uncovered in 1996 by workers at the Pipe Creek Junior limestone quarry, the sinkhole has yielded a diverse array of fossils from the Pliocene epoch, dating back five million years. Discoveries have been made there of the remains of camelids, bears, beavers, frogs, snakes, turtles, and several previously unknown species of rodents. Two fish taxa, bullhead (Ameiurus) and sunfish (Centrarchidae), have also been found there.

Origin and importance The Pipe Creek Sinkhole preserves an ancient wetland. It was created by the collapse of a limestone cave in a Silurian reef formation. That left a steep-sided depression about 75 meters (246 ft) long, 50 meters (164 ft) wide and 11 meters (36 ft) deep. When water collected in the depression, it became the habitat of the plants and animals whose remains were preserved there when the sinkhole was buried by glacial outwash and till during the Pleistocene Epoch, two million to 11,000 years ago. While the ecology of the Pliocene in North America is well known from fossil discoveries in other places, notably coastal sites, the Pleistocene glaciers destroyed or scattered most of the fossil remains in the continent's interior. The Pipe Creek Sinkhole, however, was buried by the glaciers and the debris they left, making it the only known Pliocene example in the central part of the eastern half of the continent.

The sinkhole's ecology The ancient wetland was home to a large and dense plant and animal population that includes both extinct and extant forms. The climate was warm and temperate, but somewhat dry, possibly supporting a grassland-forest transitional zone. The preserved vertebrate fauna are dominated by aquatic species, particularly leopard frogs, which are still common throughout the United States. Mammalian finds include an early rhinoceros (Teleoceras, possibly from the Miocene epoch), canids, peccaries and short-faced bear. Backed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers from the Indiana State Museum and several universities substantially completed field work at the sinkhole in the summer of 2004, but there was about one weeklong dig a year from 2005 to 2011. What probably was the last work at the site took place in 2014, with scientists and volunteers screening soil previously removed from the sinkhole.

See also Ashfall Fossil Beds Gray Fossil Site List of fossil sites (with link directory) List of sinkholes of the United States

References

Farlow, James O. and Anne Argast, Preservation of Fossil Bone from the Pipe Creek Sinkhole (Late Neogene, Grant County, Indiana U.S.A.), Journal of the Paleontological Society of Korea, 22(1):51-75, 2006. Farlow, James O. et al., New Vertebrate Fossils from the Pipe Creek Sinkhole (Late Hemphillian, Grant County, Indiana) Paper No. 7-1, delivered at Geological Society of America, North-Central Section - 38th Annual Meeting (April 1–2, 2004), St. Louis, Missouri. Farlow, James O. et al., The Pipe Creek Sinkhole Biota, a Diverse Late Tertiary Continental Fossil Assemblage from Grant County, Indiana. American Midland Naturalist, 145:367-378. Kash, Steve, Amazing Fossils: Grant County Discovery Reveals Life from 3-6 million years ago, Outdoor Indiana, March/April 1999. Kash, Steve, Dr. Jack Sunderman Looks at Ancient River, Outdoor Indiana, November/December 2001. Martin, Robert A., H. Thomas Goodwin and James O. Farlow, Late Neogene (Late Hemphillian) Rodents from the Pipe Creek Sinkhole, Grant County, Indiana. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 22(1):137-151, March 2002. Sheets, Hope A., and James O. Farlow, Size-Frequency Distribution of Leopard Frogs (rana pipiens complex) from the Late Tertiary Pipe Creek Sinkhole, Grant County, Indiana, Paper no. 16-11 presented at the 37th Annual Meeting of the North-Central Section, Geological Society of America, 24–25 March 2003, Kansas City, Missouri. Simo, J.A., and Patrick J. Lehmann, Diagenetic History of Pipe Creek Jr. Reef, Silurian, North Central Indiana, U.S.A., Journal of Sedimentary Research, 70(4):937, July 2000. Sunderman, Jack A., Surprises in a Sinkhole, ACRES Quarterly, 42(3), Autumn 2003, published by ACRES Land Trust, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

External links The Pipe Creek Sinkhole Hillsdale College: Pipe Creek Sinkhole Project Hillsdale College: Animals of the Pipe Creek Sinkhole The Paleobiology Database: Taxonomic list for Pipe Creek Jr. Reef, Pipe Creek Jr. quarry, Grant County, Indiana: Silurian, Indiana Large-scale topographic map from TopoQuest Bing Maps: The Pipe Creek Sinkhole Farlow, James O. et al. (eds.), Geology of the Late Neogene Pipe Creek Sinkhole (Grant County, Indiana), Indiana Geological Survey Special Report 69, January 2010. Retrieved 21 October 2014. Switek, Brian (17 August 2010). "Fossil feces from an Indiana sinkhole preserve traces of a meat-eater's meal". WIRED Science Blogs. Retrieved 15 February 2013. June 21, 2011, Scientist sift through Pipe Creek Jr. sink hole one more time.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Pipe Creek Sinkhole

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Pipe Creek Sinkhole claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In earth science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Pipe Creek Sinkhole before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Pipe Creek Sinkhole ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Pipe Creek Sinkhole

In research: Pipe Creek Sinkhole appears in earth science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Pipe Creek Sinkhole in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Pipe Creek Sinkhole is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1996 in paleontology, Geologic formations of Indiana, Landforms of Grant County, Indiana, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Pipe Creek Sinkhole outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Pipe Creek Sinkhole in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Pipe Creek Sinkhole means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Pipe Creek Sinkhole out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pipe Creek Sinkhole in simple terms?

Why does Pipe Creek Sinkhole matter?

Because it connects several earth science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Pipe Creek Sinkhole?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Pipe Creek Sinkhole.