Survey keeps eye on aquifer levels

For water level to last, effort must be made, researcher says.

Aquifer

Restaurant in St. Francis.

Buchanan, associate director of the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas, received a magnetized refrigerator calendar with his pancake-and-egg breakfast, just as he had the year before. Then he drove out to measure the depth of the old water that lies under the surface of western Kansas.

I talked to him on his cellular phone.

"I'm southeast of St. Francis," he started. "Just a little bit ago, I was chalking up the tape, getting it ready to put down an irrigation well. It's about 10 or 15 degrees, but sunny. No wind. A gorgeous day. I've been driving through snowdrifts. Nobody's with me. That's why I like to do this."

A few days later he had be working in southwest Kansas, catching glances of magpies through the windshield.

The depth of the water in the well he was headed for on Jan. 4 was about 215 feet, according to his laptop computer. He had a picture of the well on the screen so he wouldn't accidentally measure the wrong one, he told me.

His computer would guide him to the 16 wells he was responsible for measuring that day.

When he arrived at a well, he threaded the chalk-dusted steel tape down the well pipe. It gets tricky. The well pipe has joints, and the tape can get hung up on those.

When the tape came back, he calculated the water level by noting how much of the blue carpenter's chalk got washed off. It is like reading an oil dipstick.

When the tape touches the water surface, it touches liquid that is anywhere from a few years to a few decades old. Before the water seeps into the well, it is trapped in the pores of the gravels and sediments of the High Plains Aquifer.

Some of the aquifer water is hundreds of thousands years old --- in effect, a liquid fossil.

How important is this aquifer? It produces more than 70 percent of the state's water.

Why will Buchanan and seven other crew members from the Kansas Geological Survey measure the water level in about 500 wells this year, while Department of Agriculture personnel measure a thousand more?

Because the aquifer is under siege.

In some places, the recharge rate is about a quarter-inch a year. At some locations the drawdown is several feet a year.

The state is worried. So are groundwater management districts. A couple of those have taken measures to bring withdrawals and deposits into balance.

And irrigation techniques are more sophisticated today than they were 20 years ago. Farmers used to squirt water high in the air and lose an enormous amount to evaporation. They don't do that anymore.

As Buchanan drove and talked that day, he expressed despair at the farmsteads he saw. "It seems like half of the places are deserted," he said, "and some of those for a long, long time."

Imagine the scene if we suck the aquifer dry. There is no question that we have the power to manage million-year-old water in a way that lets us stretch it. The only question concerns our economic and political will to do so.

Columnist Roger Martin is a research writer/editor for the University of Kansas Center for Research. He also writes for and edits Explore:, research webzine of the University of Kansas, at www.research.ukans. edu/explore/.

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