Geologists Just Found Out What Ohio’s Serpent Mound Actually Is

A student in a Cincinnati classroom around 1919 told his geology professor that the rocks on his family's farm were standing on end, which in flat-layered Ohio should not happen. In this one I go through what is actually under Serpent Mound, which is the root of an impact crater, maybe five miles across, maybe nearly nine. The proof came from a drill core a mineral company pulled up while hunting for something else and then left in storage, full of shatter cones nearly all the way down. The part that gets me is the map. The first geologic map of that broken ground was drawn in 1918 by a Dayton high school teacher, got folded into Ohio's official map, and then sat unread in a Smithsonian box until 1996 while the credit went to somebody else. I will be honest about where I land on this, the impact was confirmed in 1998 and almost nobody climbing that hill has ever been told.
#archaeology #history