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96<br />
NCKRI Special Paper No. 1<br />
However, their distribution is clustered, with the density of<br />
castiles within clusters reaching 18 features/km 2 . That<br />
hypogenic speleogenesis is an ongoing process throughout<br />
the region and capable of generating large sinkhole<br />
development is exemplified by the Bottomless Lakes series<br />
of sinkholes east of Roswell, New Mexico, or the Wink<br />
Sink collapse on the eastern margin of the Delaware Basin,<br />
Texas (see Figure 61 for their location).<br />
Proper recognition of hypogenic transverse<br />
speleogenesis gives a new perspective to such important<br />
issues as assessment of sites of special concern, such as the<br />
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New<br />
Mexico, or some nuclear power plants. The most karstspecific<br />
studies for the WIPP area addressed the issue from<br />
the perspective of epigenic karst concepts (Bachman,<br />
1990; Hill, 2003b; Lorenz, 2006; Powers et al., 2006),<br />
which leads to a misleading interpretation of observed<br />
features when dealing with hypogenic karst. Recent<br />
identification of the hypogenic origin for many caves in<br />
the Rustler and Seven Rivers Formations (Stafford et al.,<br />
2008) and interpretation of regional karst development in<br />
the context of hypogenic transverse speleogenesis calls for<br />
the need of a reassessment of karst hazard for the WIPP<br />
site. Another example of special concern is the Neckar<br />
nuclear power plant in Germany, situated in a river valley<br />
above a multi-aquifer system containing a sulfate bed, with<br />
ground deformation recorded in the immediate vicinity of<br />
the plant and a major 60 m-deep collapse that occurred in<br />
1964 a few kilometers away. An additional site of concern<br />
is the Rovensky nuclear power plant in Ukraine, where old<br />
and recent collapse and subsidence features were recorded<br />
in the immediate vicinity, induced by hypogenic karst in<br />
the confined Cretaceous chalk aquifer, a part of the<br />
Volyno-Podol'sky artesian basin.<br />
Figure 62. Distribution of breakdown structures in Zoloushka Cave<br />
in plan (A, map fragment) and profile (B). 1 = cave passages; 2 =<br />
passages destroyed by the quarry; 3 = isopachytes; 4 - 7 =<br />
breakdown structures with the breakout cavities positioned at<br />
various levels: 4 - at the bottom of the overlying aquifer, 5 - within<br />
the confining clays, 6 - within the sandy-gravel bed, the upper<br />
aquifer, 7 - within the loam bed; 8 = surface karst features; 9 = the<br />
quarry faces (from Klimchouk and Andrejchuk, 2005).