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The blasting began in an area known as “Community Well #1” near Las Cruces, New Mexico, as part of a three-year effort led by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to repair damaging upper walls left in an area that was once heavily mined. moat. (among other works). But the site is the only known location of some fossils in the entire state, and some experts question whether the BLM is doing everything it can to balance public protection and the preservation of the fossils it is meant to protect.
Community Pit is an approximately 85-acre domain near Prehistoric Trackways National Monument, which is home to a wide diversity of vertebrate tracks. It became a source of structural curtains in 1969, but this use ended in 2007. The scars of decades of mining remain in the form of very tall and highly volatile rock faces. Existing remediation efforts began because “the BLM has observed an increase in the number of visitors climbing over and under scour and high walls,” explained William Wight, a spokesman for the BLM’s Las Cruces district. In late 2022, the BLM Las Cruces District Office has made Community Well Public Health Project No. 1 one of the district’s most sensible priorities. “
The scope of this task includes “detonation, reshaping, seeding and revegetation” on approximately 50 acres of the network well. The blasting will have a significant impact on the most sensitive layer of sediment that makes up the 150-foot walls. It is the lowest layer of rock in the well – a geological formation known as the Robledo Mountain Formation – that comprises the network well’s unique fossils: rest and burrow lines through jellyfish and horseshoe crabs from the Lower Permian (some 290 million years). more or less ago). This is the only known location of jellyfish and horseshoe crab tracks in New Mexico.
The BLM’s environmental assessment for this task acknowledges that the heavy apparatus used to move destroyed tissues and reshape the domain can damage those fossils and “reduce their clinical value. “It also notes that other layers of the site, which may also be affected, have “very high prospects for clinically important vertebrate and invertebrate fossil indications. . . »
Long before the existing project, paleontologists begged the BLM Las Cruces District Office to preserve the fossils in the net painting pit. One of those paleontologists is Spencer Lucas, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, whose paintings at the site are widely seen. cited in BLM environmental assessment. In an interview with Ars, Lucas said he and his scientific colleagues have asked, not once, but twice, that the BLM keep the fossils in the net painting pit and hold an outdoor exhibit to show the characteristics. exposed. through mining. They do this while making the well safer for the public.
The first set of recommendations, he said, came in 1994 in an unpublished BLM report created by Lucas and his colleagues. Similar suggestions were made to BLM in a report he co-authored in 2013. BLM ignored them, he says.
When asked about this, Wight explained that those reports were taken into account, but to “facilitate public safety, movements made through BLM are necessary. ” Public displays, he said, will have to await a long-term planning process.
Ensuring public safety and protecting fossils are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And the BLM will have a paleontologist monitor the area prior to and after blasting. Beyond that, things are flexible. “The day-to-day tasks of paleontological monitoring,” Wight stated, “will adapt and adjust as material is exposed that could potentially contain trace fossils. Duration of monitoring is as needed.” Should a worker happen to notice the tiny trace fossils and halt construction, the initial person authorized to decide how best to proceed will be a BLM manager.
Workers and device operators will receive training on what to look for through a program known as the “Worker Environmental Awareness Program (WEAP). ” However, fossil clues can be difficult to identify, even for experienced ichnologists (those who clue fossils). Perhaps most importantly, at this site “most of those lines are one part of a dollar or less in length,” Lucas said. “So how are you going to see them, especially from a bulldozer or a truck?
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