The Geology of Canaan Valley

Canaan Valley (hereafter, the Valley) is located in the Folded Plateau Physiographic Province of the Appalachian Mountains. The Province features broad, gentle folds and low, structural dips. The Valley lies over the Blackwater Anticline, one of three structures that characterize the high plateau in which the Valley is set. The Anticline plunges northward, creating a broad amphitheater at the Valley's northern end. Southward, the Anticline truncates against a zone of discordance. The cause of the discordance is unknown. South of this zone, the Plateau is more deeply dissected, and the Anticline cannot be traced. In its place, there are three structures that terminate northward against the zone. Local stratigraphy controls the Valley's landscape. Six stratigraphic units—the Pennsylvanian Kanawha Formation, New River Formation, Mississippian Mauch Chunk Formation, Greenbrier Limestone Formation, Price Formation, and Devonian Hampshire Formation—outcrop in the Valley. The ridges in the Valley are supported by the coarse-grained to conglomeratic sandstones of the Kanawha Formation. Conglomerates of the Rockwell Member of the Price Formation underlie the low ridge in the Valley's center. Red mudstones of the Mauch Chunk form the Valley's walls, and the Greenbrier Limestone underlies the floor of the Valley. Two major unconformities are present in the Valley's stratigraphic section. First, the contact between the Price and the Greenbrier is a major Mississippian unconformity. Second, the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian boundary, represented by the Mauch Chunk-New River contact, is a large regional unconformity represented in southern West Virginia by the Pocahontas and Lower New River formations. On the latest geological map of the Valley, the New River and Kanawha formations are lumped into a single mapping unit because the contact between them is difficult to differentiate due to lack of exposure. Coal and natural gas have been extracted in the Valley area. Coal has been mined from the Upper Freeport coal of the Allegheny Formation and the Bakerstown coal of the Glenshaw Formation (Conemaugh Group). Surface mines associated with these coals form a horseshoe pattern that follows the outcrops of the coals, stretching from the Pendleton Creek area west of Davis to the area south of the Mount Storm Power Plant. Natural gas is produced from the Oriskany Sandstone along the crest of the Blackwater Anticline in the Valley and from the Jordan Run Gas Field just east of the Allegheny Front.