Studies
In 1967 there were two physical surveys trips into cave, but neither found evidence of the Jones Brothers story, or for a story that in 1949 an army saber from the American Civil War was found within the cave. All it found was that the cave had no entrance other than the reliable spring entrance on Beargrass Creek.
"Bad air" is present in the cave, with very high levels of carbon dioxide just inside the entrance. Dangerous hypoxia is possible within minutes, and fatal poisoning is likely farther into the cave. Concentrations of CO2 inside the cave are in excess of 10 times the normal atmospheric value.
It is the only known location for living Louisville cave beetles, Pseudanophthalmus troglodytes. This insect is reddish-brown, small, eyeless, and eats invertebrates. The Louisville cave beetle was described in 1973 from specimens collected from Oxmoor Cave (near Oxmoor Center). During 1994, surveys of other caves that could potentially support the species were conducted and the species was found in only one additional cave: Eleven Jones Cave. Oxmoor Cave was bulldozed over in 1990. It has been listed as "imperiled" by the Kentucky Natural Heritage Program. Since 1994 it has been a candidate for ESA protection, but currently has no state or federal protections.
Read more about this topic: Eleven Jones Cave
Famous quotes containing the word studies:
“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)