Cave fill magnetostratigraphy

I recently had the idea of reconstructing a depositional history of my cave fill using magnetostratigraphy. I contacted Dr. Reynolds at Brevard U. who formally ran an LLC conducting such work, but he no longer has the time to run it as a business. He told me to contact Dr. Sasowsky at Akron. Sasowsky is an expert in karst and cave fill and was able to speak to me over the phone about cave fill magnetostratigraphy.

The technique is usually carried out on sediments or rocks younger than Mid Jurassic so they can be compared to the Geomagnetic Polarity Time Scale (GPTS) which has been constructed from the measurements of ocean floor polarity, hence the Mid Jurassic time constraint. However, some work has been done on older rocks and a complete global scale is slowly being built. Analyses on the Cherokee Series has not been completed, so there is nothing to compare my cave fills to if the work was to be done. However, the technique could still be used to compare the polarities between outcrops, to see if they were deposited at the same time or if the deposition overlapped at all.

But there is another hitch to this type of work. The older the rocks are the harder it is to get reliable data. This is due to new polarities being recorded when fluids move through the rocks. Measurements of 3 or 4 polarities would not be uncommon for cave fills of this age and their reliability for use as global comparisons is unlikely. The polarities could still be correlated between cave fills.

Magnetostratigraphy is difficult work to both conduct and analyze. Therefore, getting U. of Michigan (where Sasowsky has his work done) or any other lab to conduct these tests is very doubtful. The number of labs which actually do this is dwindling on account of its difficulties. The Slovenians (the birthplace of karst science) are the only ones who conduct cave fill magnetostrat on rocks this old.