List of caves of Maryland

After the release of these articles in 1946, a more comprehensive study was begun by William Davies, whose years of fieldwork led to the compilation of the premiere edition of Caves of Maryland in 1950.

In the late 1960s the MGS sponsored another statewide survey, undertaken by Richard Franz and Dennis Slifer, and a second, expanded edition of Caves of Maryland was released in 1971.

On top of these, older, harder thrust sheets of metamorphic rocks from the Paleozoic give these mountains their well-defined crests and ridges.

Wolf Rock, home to Maryland's best-known non-solutional cave, is an example of quartzite that has endured while Catoctin Mountain has weathered around it.

South Mountain, which serves as a natural border between Frederick and Washington counties, is the western edge of Maryland's Blue Ridge, giving way to an area of relatively little relief, known as the Great Valley (or locally as Hagerstown/Cumberland).

Here the harder metamorphosed rocks of the Blue Ridge are replaced by carbonates, sandstones, and shale that grow progressively younger moving west, entering the early Ordovician period.

The highest concentration of Maryland caves lies within the Hagerstown Valley, where well-established waterways have cut into the underlying carbonate rocks.

The probability of cave development, however, is also very strongly influenced by the presence of structural features such as anticlinal axes, synclinal troughs, and faults.

Synclines within this region have preserved remains from the younger Carboniferous Period—the period containing Maryland's only natural source of carbon fuels—within the Mississippian system lies the Greenbrier Formation, the next oldest limestone member known to contain caves.

All younger sediments have been removed from the landscape with the exception of the Dunkard Group, a small knob in Allegany County that is Permian in age.