Kettle Moraine geology, in 3D
Where two ice lobes met and dumped what they were carrying. The densest drilling record of anywhere in this list, by four times.
You are looking at a cut through the real ground beneath Kettle Moraine, Wisconsin. Every bed in the face comes from what drillers wrote down as they drilled through it: here, that record is 40,437 described intervals in 10,415 well logs, averaging 176 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.