Langenberg limestone quarry
Coordinates: 51 ° 54 ′ 6.8 ″ N , 10 ° 30 ′ 15.8 ″ E
The Langenberg limestone quarry , also called Kalkwerk Oker or Langenberg quarry , is a quarry operated between 1871 and 1985 between the districts of Harlingerode and Göttingerode in the city of Bad Harzburg and the district of Oker in the city of Goslar in the Goslar district in Lower Saxony . Due to the discovery of the Europesaurus in 1999 and the uncovering of many other finds, it is one of the most important finding sites of Mesozoic fossils in Europe. The mining company produces building materials and fertilizer lime under the name of Rohstoffbetriebe Oker GmbH & Co.
geology
The quarry site is located a few kilometers north of the North Harz Rim Fault , a geological fault with an activation period in the Lower Cretaceous . Together with the Langenberg, this can be viewed as part of the direct southern border of the North German lowlands .
In the limestone quarry, there are overturned layers of the Malm (i.e. the northern German Upper Jurassic ), which have been biostratigraphically dated to the period from the early Oxfordian to the late Kimmeridgian (approx. 160 to 150 million years before today) using foraminifera and ostracods . The layers dip about 70 ° south, that is, the layers have been rotated from the horizontal by 110 ° to the north. In the quarry, a sequence from the upper part of the Lower Korallenoolith to the Upper “Kimmeridge” (Upper Süntel Formation) is exposed . The thickness of the opened sequence is approximately 200 m. The sequence was consistently deposited in a shallow marine environment and consists of oolite , which is partially ferrous and partially contains oncoids , clay and marl stones and limestones as well as dolomitic limestones. Fischer (1991) gives a precise lithological description.
The macrofossil content of the Jurassic layers consists mainly of shells and shells of invertebrate marine animals, some of which have been handed down as stone cores , above all of mussels (often oysters in the coral olith ), snails and brachiopods , more rarely of corals , bog animals , sea urchins and shell-bearing cephalopods . The trace fossil Thalassinoides is relatively common in the marly layers of the Süntel Formation . In a layer of this formation, in addition to bony fishes in some cases incomplete skeletons also numerous individual bones, terrestrial vertebrates handed, including turtles and Sauropoden , especially the "Zwergsauropode" Europasaurus . They were probably introduced into the Vorharz Jurassic Sea by rivers from nearby islands.
history
Early history of the Oker lime works
The lime works was founded in 1871 as a family business. Their yield was moderate at first, so the lime had to be laboriously mined and transported over three kilometers to the nearest train station by horse and cart. The sole owner at the time, Adolph Willikens sen. had the company converted into the stock corporation Adolph Willikens Aktiengesellschaft on May 1, 1923 . The company was expanded in the 1930s and 1940s, so the plants for the production of unslaked and slaked building lime were rebuilt and two new high-performance shaft kilns were installed.
The plant survived the Second World War unscathed. Further investments were made, including the establishment of a rail connection for the slaked lime that is now burnt on site. The concrete shelf set up in 1948 by the Preuße company had a filling speed of 500 bags / hour.
With the closure of the Hansa mine in 1960, the eastern mining operations of which prevented further lime mining, a change of course occurred. In the same year, the quarry was taken over by the newly founded company Rohstoffbetriebe Oker GmbH & Co. , which subsequently acquired the mine site of the Hansa mine in southern Langenberg at the turn of the year 1960/61. The plant's shaft furnaces were converted into modern ring shaft furnaces, which were now operated with heavy oil instead of coke as fuel. In addition, a quality test laboratory was set up due to the increased demands of customers, which examined the lime according to the building lime standard DIN 1060.
End of the cancellation phase
In the 1960s, contemporary plans envisaged expanding the demolition site beyond the Harlingerode-Göttingerode road to the east as far as the outskirts of Schlewecke . A tunnel would have been drilled under the connecting road through which the lime would have been transported to the plant to the west. The execution of this plan would have cut a 200 meter wide aisle through the Langenberg to the outskirts of Schleweck by around 2010. The community of Harlingerode, on whose territory the quarry was located and to which the southern Göttingerode also belonged, showed fundamental interest. The district of Goslar rejected the expansion of lime mining on July 7, 1976; However, this decision was revised by the Braunschweig Administrative Court on June 29, 1982. As a result, the environmental protection committee of the district of Goslar decided on May 23, 1984 to set up the nature reserve Östlicher Langenberg . This decision was confirmed by a judgment of the Lower Saxony Higher Administrative Court in Lüneburg on June 6, 1985, which prohibited mining on the eastern Langenberg.
As a result, the lime works announced the closure of the plant in December 1985. Subsequent uses as a landfill or a possible reactivation of limestone mining to the north with a capacity for another 20 years were considered, but ultimately not implemented. Instead, from 1992 the company focused on gravel mining in Steinfeld on the northern edge of the Harlingeröder Feldmark.
Fossil discovery 1999
The private collector Holger Lüdtke discovered pieces of a fossilized skeleton in the limestone quarry in February 1999. An inspection by the Landesmuseum Hannover revealed that the find was a paleontological sensation. Both fossilized herbivores and predatory dinosaurs were identified during this initial review. A further investigation in August 1999, carried out by a commission from the dinosaur park in Münchehagen and the Geological Institute of Leibniz University Hannover, of around 40 tons of lime, showed that further finds can be assumed in the layers of the Upper Jurassic.
"Juramuseum Harz"
As a result of what happened, demands were raised regarding the establishment of an open-air museum "Juramuseum Harz". Inspired by the existing business model in the Münchehagen Dinosaur Park, consideration was given to using plastic reconstructions of dinosaurs, along with a beach landscape including an underwater tunnel. However, these considerations subsided after around 2005.
Web links
literature
- Alfred Breustedt: Oker lime works . In: 950 years of Harlingerode. 1053-2003. (Ortschronik) Harlingerode 2003, OCLC 249318716 . Pp. 76-82.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Rudolf Fischer: The Upper Jurassic layer sequence from Langenberg near Oker . In: Arbeitskreis Paläontologie Hannover - magazine for amateur paleontologists . tape 19 , no. 2 , 1991, p. 21–36 ( ap-h.de [PDF; 4.5 MB ]).
- ^ A b José L. Carballido, P. Martin Sander: Postcranial axial skeleton of Europäischeaurus holgeri (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Upper Jurassic of Germany: implications for sauropod ontogeny and phylogenetic relationships of basal Macronaria . In: Journal of Systematic Palaeontology . tape 12 , no. 3 , 2014, p. 335-387 , doi : 10.1080 / 14772019.2013.764935 .
- ↑ a b P. Martin Sander, Octávio Mateus, Thomas Laven, Nils Knötschke: Bone histology indicates insular dwarfism in a new Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur . In: Nature . tape 441 , no. 7094 , June 8, 2006, p. 739-741 , doi : 10.1038 / nature04633 .
- ^ Joachim Fricke: Kalkwerk Oker - a description from 1953 . technikmuseum-online.de - Articles on the history of traffic and technology (private website), 2013, accessed on June 17, 2018.