Abstract
The Friars Hole Cave System in Greenbrier and Pocahontas Counties, West Virginia, at 73.4 km, is the longest cave in the Appalachian Highlands of eastern USA. The cave System, composed of three internal drainage complexes extending over a linear distance of almost 7 km, has had a long and complex evolution with most of it being over 730,000 years old and one dated speleothem having an age of over 1.67 million years. Although nearly the entire cave System is developed in the upper Greenbrier Group limestones (the Union and Pickaway limestones), two of the cave’s three active drainages breach the Taggard formation, a major aquitard below the Pickaway and extending the cave’s stratigraphic extent. The cave represents an evolutionary sequence of drainage Systems discharging to two springs 20-km distant from each other with high flows discharge to one and low flows to the other. Drainage patterns have shifted over time as the surface drainage is captured. An estimated age for the entire System is 4.1 million years.
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