asscciation for mexican cave studies box 7672 ut station austin ...

morphogenetic feature involving gravity erosion. Lots of chip breakdown lieswhere it fell, with no talus morphology.I'm also making a deliberate issue of "siphon", because there is hardly evera physical siphoning effect at these places. They are just low areas, traps,where water collects and fills the passage up to the ceiling. A true siphon, youwill recall, consists of two reservoirs connected by a higher (but air-tight)channel containing moving water under a vacuum.I'm not especially opposed to an "upper level" symbol, but the definitionshould make it clear that this is an uppermost level where two other, lower levels,also are present. It's not too logical to have an implied main level, and a lowerlevel, and an upper level, when there never are more than two passages involved.That is, people start thinking of geomorphic levels and terrace levels and olderand younger levels and pretty soon the map is full of implied cave history insteadof being purely descriptive.Your-water , depth sYmbol' comes from some other standard source, I know. Mine,from Audetat, is less likely to be confused with numbers standing for other things.I know of no other stateside cave map sYmbols list which uses ruled linesfor water. This is common overseas, but essentially never in the US. I don't thinkyou could make it stick, even if it were adopted -- which is why I'm not trying,even though the UIS calls for ruled lines. If I should agree to change this, thenI'd have to rework several of my other water-related sYmbols. It's not worth it.See p. 16 et seq in the ms for a.full defense.Your "maSSive flowstone" is the same as Vineyard's "column", which is the oneI'm using in preference to the older list. It's not that much of a difference thatpeople would be confused, but it's not quite the same.There's no difference between your "flows tone column" and an ink spot, whichis why I'm not using individual dots for anything in my list. An ink spot alwayshas to be associated with an obviously intentional marking on the paper, otherwiseit will be ambiguous.Your"dome" sYmbol could be reconciled with my "ceiling ledge" simply by addingdots between the dashes. Even so, there is no way, in your system, to representdomepits -- features with both height and depth in relation to the reference level(an intersecting passage). I guess I was thinking "vertical shaft", and it wouldn'tbe too good an idea to leave genetic cave interpretation up to week-end cavesurveyors. Can you modify yours to include alternatively pits and/or domes orboth in the same scheme of sYmbol?I agree that, ideally, bedrock floor should be mapped, not assumed. On theother hand, if bedrock floor is mapped over a large area, the symbol will causeproblems with mapping anything else. Try mapping a bedrock stream channel containingbreakdown, for example. It will become extremely cluttered, especiallyafter reduction. If there are speleothems on the ceiling above, it will becomeincomprehensible and require two or more maps, each showing one class of cavefeature - speleothems, water, floor materials. This is why I said "assumed" ifnot mapped. I won't argue over it, though, if you want to drop the "assumed" part.Boxwork is so rare that there probably would be no harm in retaining yoursymbol. Few opportunities for conflict. One other criticism is ~hat youcannot map the true areal extent of a bedrock floor as I can, because your symbolconsists of disconnected segments whereas mine is continuous•.I'll go along with your "human debris" -- my cave area has many more arrowheadsthan pots, so I naturally drew an arrowhead.You have no outright conflicts with UIS except your "column", which they usefor "stalagmite."19