Hocking Hills geology, in 3D
The unglaciated edge of the Appalachian Plateau, cut into gorges. Shale and sandstone in alternating bands all the way down.
You are looking at a cut through the real ground beneath Hocking Hills, Ohio. Every bed in the face comes from what drillers wrote down as they drilled through it: here, that record is 14,530 described intervals in 2,195 well logs, averaging 218 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.