AIRBORNE LIDAR-BASED 3D STRUCTURAL MODELING OF COVER DEFORMATION WITHIN THE CENTRAL APPALACHIAN VALLEY AND RIDGE PROVINCE

Despite multiple investigations, the structural style exposed at the Smoke Hole region of eastern West Virginia remains controversial. The Smoke Hole Canyon of Grant and Pendleton counties consists of an 18 mile- long northeast trending canyon within the Central Appalachian Valley and Ridge Province. The canyon has been carved by the South Branch of the Potomac River resulting in excellent exposures of meso and macro-scale geological structures. The cover sequence represents a package of folded and faulted strata which overlie a thick sequence of Cambrian-Ordovician carbonates with widely spaced imbricate thrust faults. Early studies interpreted the cover sequence as being dominated by imbricated thrust faults (Sites, 1971), while more recent mappers believed the structures can be explained by folding alone (Gerritsen, 1988). In the winter of 2015, the Smoke Hole area was scanned using aerial Lidar remote sensing technology, producing a “bare-earth” digital elevation model (DEM) in which outcrop exposures and structural features are visible in high resolution. The objective of this research will be to use this new data coupled with field verification trips to (1) resolve the structural geometry of the cover sequence exposed at the Smoke Holes, (2) produce a 3D structural model using 2Dmove modeling software, (3) estimate the amount of shortening accommodated by folding and/or faulting, (4) demonstrate the application of aerial Lidar technology in structural modeling of subsurface geology, and (5) provide insight in to the general structural style of deformation within the cover sequence of the Valley and Ridge Province on a regional scale.