CGRG Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology
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Author : Ford, D.C.; Lauritzen, S.E.; and Worthington, S.R.H.
Date : 2000.
Title : Speleogenesis of Castleguard Cave, Rocky Mountains, Alberta, Canada.
Publication : Speleogenesis Evolution of Karst Aquifers. Edited by: Klimchouk, A.B.; Ford, D.C.; Palmer, A.N.; and Dreybrodt, W. National Speleological Society. Huntsville, AL, United States.
Issue :
Page(s) : 332-337.
Abstract
Castleguard Cave is in the Main Ranges of the Rocky Mountains of Canada . It is a relict upper level cave about 20 km in length formed in massive regularly bedded platform limestone of Middle Cambrian age. For a distance of 8 km it passes beneath Castleguard Mountain, with up to 800 m of Upper Cambrian-Ordovician cover rocks preserved above it today. The cave is a good example of State 2 multiloop phreatic conduit development, with a vadose canyon entrenched in the upstream (higher) end of each loop. The looping in the headward and central sectors of the cave (7 km) is guided by one master bedding plane and long vertical fractures that intersect it. The master plane was slightly opened by crushing associated with differential slip of a few centimeters during tectonic uplift. Downstream, a phreatic lift of 24 m conveyed the groundwater into a similar stratigraphically higher bedding plane that guides most of the passages there. When initiated, the cave may have been a single deep loop with a vertical amplitude of about 370 m. Once enlarged by dissolution and with stabilized springs, the greatest amplitude in the multiple loops was the 24 m required to gain the controlling bedding plane downstream. The cave became a hydrologic relict more than 780,000 years ago but has since been invaded and modified by alpine and subglacial water on several occasions. Modern groundwater (including water sinking beneath the greatest icefield remaining in the Rocky Mountains) passes through one or more lower level cave systems that are inaccessible. The hydrologic behavior suggests that the morphology of these caves is similar to that of the known cave. The largest meltwater floods today impose a hydrostatic head of more than 300 m onto the base flow springs, temporarily rejuvenating the downstream end of the relict cave.
Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology