DEVELOPMENT OF THE CARBONATE ISLAND KARST MODEL

Abstract

Abstract: The development of a comprehensive conceptual model for carbonate island karst began in the Bahamas in the 1970s. The use, initially, of cave and karst models created for the interior of continents, on rocks hundreds of millions of years old, was not successful. Models developed in the 1980s for the Bahamas, that recognized the youthfulness of the carbonate rock, the importance of fresh-water mixing with sea water, and the complications introduced by glacioeustatic sea-level change produced the first viable model, the flank margin cave model. This model explains the largest caves in carbonate islands as being the result of mixing zone dissolution in the distal margin of the fresh-water lens, under the flank of the enclosing land mass. The flank margin model, taken from the Bahamas to Isla de Mona, Puerto Rico, in the early 1990s, provided the first viable explanation for the very large caves there. Field work in the geologically-complex Mariana Islands in the late 1990s resulted in the development of the Carbonate Island Karst Model, or CIKM, which integrated the various components controlling cave and karst development on carbonate islands. These components are: 1) Mixing of fresh and salt water to create dissolutional aggressivity; 2) Movement of the fresh-water lens, and hence the mixing environments, by 100+ m as a result of Quaternary glacioeustasy; 3) The overprinting of glacioeustatic changes by local tectonic movements, where present; 4) The unique behavior of eogenetic (diagenetically immature) carbonate rocks; and 5) The classification of carbonate islands into simple, carbonate cover, composite, and complex categories. Current research involves the use of flank margin caves as predictors of past and present fresh-water lens configuration, the analysis of flank margin cave morphology as a measure of the processes that create them, and the CIKM as an indicator of paleokarst distribution.