Driftless Area geology, in 3D

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Driftless Area geology, in 3D

The Driftless Area: the corner of the Midwest the ice sheets went around, left standing while everything about it was flattened.

You are looking at a cut through the real ground beneath Mississippi Bluffs, La Crosse. Every bed in the face comes from what drillers wrote down as they drilled through it: here, that record is 6,136 described intervals in 2,413 well logs, averaging 135 ft deep. Where the face has direct evidence it draws solid; where the evidence runs out it fades to black rather than guess.

DrillerDB standardized 13 million well logs from state and county records across North America — drillers' own words, read off scanned reports and mapped to USGS lithologic terms — into one national grid. This viewer reads that grid, over terrain from USGS 3DEP and public aerial imagery.

Five places to start

• Driftless — The Driftless Area: the corner of the Midwest the ice sheets went around, left standing while everything about it was flattened.
• Kettle Moraine — Where two ice lobes met and dumped what they were carrying. The densest drilling record of anywhere in this list, by four times.
• Hocking Hills — The unglaciated edge of the Appalachian Plateau, cut into gorges. Shale and sandstone in alternating bands all the way down.
• Bend — The dry side of the Cascades, built out of its own volcanoes: lava flows stacked on cinders on ash, and the deepest domestic record on this list.
• Fox Lake — Farm country flat enough that there is nothing to see from the road, with a bed of shale lying in sandstone a hundred feet under it.

Look under your own ground

Search any address on the well map, or read about the research program behind the data.