Well, I’ve always been a generalist.
I started working for the
Highway Commission in the summers and then
worked for the Kansas
Highway Commission after I graduated.
That’s where I met Dick
when we initially formed the Kansas City-Omaha
section of the
Association of Engineering Geologists back
about 45 years ago,
and then I worked in research for the Highway
Commission.
I got
paid to be curious.
I inspected dams for the Department of
Agriculture.
I went out and worked in the oil and gas industry
for a short time, got back on the State working
in water rights,
and my hobby has been adjunct professor.
This is my 29th year at
Washburn and I taught at Wichita State and
Pratt Community
College, so the students make me stay current.
From some of the
evidence of looking at the quality of coals
in eastern Kansas, it
appears that approximately one-half mile of
material has been
removed off of eastern Kansas, so it had been
deposited possibly
up through Cretaceous times and then with
the uplift essentially
one-half a mile has been eroded away and once
that material is
eroded away it’s carried downstream and
been emptied out into the
Gulf of Mexico.
At one time the Gulf of Mexico had an embayment
that extended as far north as Cairo, Illinois.
The material
that’s eroded off the midcontinent is filled
in that embayment
all the way down to the present Gulf Coast.
So there’s been a
lot more of Kansas and Missouri here in the
past but it’s gone so
we have to sort of use the best evidence we
have from other
places that correlate back to Kansas and Missouri
to get an idea
of what went on during this time period, so
now, if some of you
have some questions.
I’ve got one.
As you drive around Kansas City/Topeka, this
general area around this general region, what
are the top
geological sites that we should be aware of
or the most valuable
geological sites?
Well, some of the nice ones were exposed along
Interstate 70.
Here in the Kansas City area you have most
of the rock layers of
the Kansas City formation or group I should
say, Kansas City
group, exposed.
Those layers do dip to the west and further
out
in western Kansas in some of the deep oil
fields they do produce
oil and gas out of those zones, and perhaps
you’ve noticed some
of the black shales that have been deposited
around.
They sort
of weather out at the surface, sort of dark
gray in color and
almost break into paper-thin layers.
Well these are high organic
shales.
They didn’t have enough organic material
in them to
become coals, but out of the carbon that was
in those layers when
they’re buried heat and pressure we cook
out the carbon and form
oil and gas, so they are some of the producing
horizon or source
rock horizons as you go further west.
Also, some people are
concerned about the black shales.
Most of them have a rather
high radioactive content.
I knew one geologist with Kansas
Geological Survey.
It turned out he was excavating a site for
a
new house he was building in Lawrence and
actually excavated into
one of the black shales.
Of course, everyone was concerned now,
are you going to get radioactive products
out of them, but
unfortunately, well I should say fortunately
those shales are so
tight that the radioactive gases and daughter
products can’t
migrate out of them.
They’re trapped within shales.
So you have
more problems with things like radon coming
out of some of the
gravels with breakdown of uranium.
So really the black shales
you don’t have to worry that much about
here, but in western
Kansas they’re great markers in the oil
and gas industry for
running radioactive logs and interpreting
the stratum out there.
In the Manhattan area, the Tuttle Creek Spillway—it
was badly
eroded in the ’93 flood with the massive
amount of water that
went through that, but the work with the Kansas
Geological Survey
and paleontologists world-wide they have determined
that the
boundary between two (pardon me), boundary
between two periods
occurs in the spillway at Tuttle Creek in
the Howell limestone
and this limestone is actually the boundary
between the
Pennsylvania and Permian periods, and now
with correlation with
the layers in the Perm Basin in Russia, Tuttle
Creek Spillway has
been designated as the stratotype for the
Pennsylvania and
Permian boundary for the entire North America.
Now that gets
geologists excited but not too many other
people, but you can go
up in the spillway at Tuttle Creek and collect
some fossils that
are loose on the surface or some of the rocks
that are loose.
They don’t allow you to dig in the spillway.
Dick mentioned the
ice over Kansas City area was probably 400
or 500 feet thick.
At
Topeka, we just barely had the ice push across
the Kansas River
and was maybe 100 or 200 feet thick, but if
you get back up to
the northeast corner of Kansas and right where
the states pretty
well come together up there, probably the
continental glacier was
1,000 feet thick.
As you go on up to the center of the
continental ice up in Canada, there your thickness
was probably
around 10,000 feet thick.
So the ice basically filled up this
big pile that acts like mountain ranges do
today, actually
directed the weather around itself and drew
in moisture and
leashed it out to continually build it up
until the end of the
Ice Ages.
How can you estimate how thick it was in different
areas like
that?
What is it you look at that tells you that?
In part, some of the deformation in the shales
and limestones and
how much pressure it would have taken to deform
those layers.
Also, Hudson Bay is the largest continental
sea in North America
and it’s still there right now because the
crust hasn’t
completely rebounded from being depressed
by the great ice cap
that was over that area and as it rebounds
probably the Hudson
Bay will eventually be dry, and also the area
to the north side
of the Great Lakes is rising up faster with
rebound than on the
south side so we are actually spilling the
Great Lakes toward
their southern shorelines and eventually maybe
we’ll get the Lake
Michigan draining back into the Mississippi
basin like it used
to.
Is it going to take the silver carp with it?
Actually, the Himalaya Mountains distort the
movement of the air
currents around the Northern Hemisphere.
Well, when you add
10,000 feet of glaciers it also did the same
sort of distortion
and that brought moist Pacific moisture down
in across the
southwestern United States and that was dumped
out there and it
fed all the pluvial lakes that are in the
desert basins that we
see today.
Now, that much weight of ice tends to grind
up the
rocks at the bottom and quite often literally
reduces the rocks
to flour-sized material.
So if you see a white stream coming out
of a glacier, this is carrying out that glacial
flour and then as
it goes out away from the glacier the channels
get filled up, the
channels move back and forth over an alluvial
surface, and then
periods where it’ll dry up and the winds
will pick it up and blow
it up out of the river valleys and up onto
the surfaces around
it.
So these vertical loess bluffs you get right
here in the
Kansas City area, it used to be the Highway
Commission tried to
stand those up straight because they’d stand
up that way and they
wouldn’t erode off, but then with the newer
ideas about wanting
to have vegetation on the slopes and making
them all nice and
pretty and covered with vegetation, which
as a geologist I think
that isn’t the right idea.
Let’s have the nice rocks out there
to see them.
But the loess would build up layer by layer
and it
has a vertical structure that allows water
to migrate through it
and so it’ll stand up, but once you lay
it back then you notice
there’s an awful lot of erosion to those
slopes.
You have to get
them vegetated to preserve them then and the
loess makes
fantastic agricultural land.
The loess areas out in western
Kansas—these are our productive fields out
there now, we all, the
irrigation water to them.
And also, finer material was blown up
and clays were carried further away than the
silt-size loess, so
as you get away from the loess areas than
the soil starts getting
tight because you have clays out in those
areas and it makes a
tighter soil that you have to deal with.
Yes sir.
I see the Highway Department has cut through
rocky areas and so
we can see the strata through the ages.
Uh-huh.
OK.
And I also see the, like a river bottom, like
the Missouri
River bottom, the bluffs are 200 or 300 feet
high, and is that
naturally water erosion?
Yes it is.
The streams removing the material.
Huh.
When the glacial periods are in at their maximum,
this last
glacial period probably lowered sea level
about 450 feet because
that water was taken out of the oceans and
locked up on the
continents.
So that allowed the streams to cut down to
a lower
base level.
So right here under the Missouri River, under
the
Kansas River, those streams cut down very
deep valleys under the
present valleys to match sea level that was
450 feet lower.
Then
as sea level rose that led to more sediments
filling in those
deep cuts and brining the level back up to
above what we see
today, and we’re in an erosional period
for the streams to be
cutting back down into their alluvial valleys.
I believe under
one of the bridges on the, I can’t remember
which highway it is,
had about 170 feet of alluvium underneath
the surface before they
started building the bridge.
So I see this strata thousands and thousands
of years and that’s
pretty comprehensible that it grew up or was
deposited, and then
there are also rocks on the surface which
just seem to be out of
place, and could you describe some of those
rocks or how they got
there.
Well, they call those erratics, and most of
them in this swath of
Missouri and Kansas were brought in by the
glaciers.
That’s why
you can have the giant boulders that were
carried along in the
ice and in some cases those boulders were
locked up at the bottom
of the ice and they actually left gouges in
the bedrock, can be
traced to some of the giant boulders that
were dropped by the ice
and preserved at the present time.
And humans, particularly like
the pink quartzite boulders so future geologists
are going to
have a hard time interpreting the edge of
the ice field because
humans are taking this stuff out and using
it for decorative
purposes and hauling it all over the place.
So that and these
little asphalt seams and artificial conglomerate
seams that run
all over the place we call roads.
Just think what they’re going
to do to the poor geologists in a few thousands
of years trying
to interpret those deposits.
I have lots of questions.
(Laughs).
How about back in Pangaea,
was it when all the continents were together
in one land mass?
Yes, that was the last supercontinent.
Supercontinent, and were changes being made
then or formations
occurring then that the continents broke apart
and they were all
carried away (Uh-huh) that were what we see
today is something
that happened maybe back when it was all together.
Record in rock and continents are nice.
They keep the things
above sea level where it’s easier for us
to study them, and
really no place on the sea floor itself is
the surface more than
250 million years in age because all the sea
floors older than
that have already been recycled.
Now occasionally sea floors are
trapped within the continents so the continents
are lighter, they
float above the heavier mantle and they don’t
sink and get
recycled.
So this is how we can study these older rocks
that are
trapped here on the continent.
Now, how old do you think
southern Kansas and southern Missouri are
as far as compared to
the age of the earth?
The granites that underlie these areas
were developed on the edge of what became
North America
continent, about 1.4 to 1.5 billion years
before the present, and
then they got eroded off, they’ve been covered
over, had more
deposits laid down on top of them but preserved
and we can drill
through and study, but down in Woodson and
Wilson counties in
Kansas we had volcanos back about 90 million
years ago during
Cretaceous times that erupted so violently
they absolutely ripped
some of those primordial continental granites
that formed North
America and brought those up within the magma
so we can actually
find some of this ancient bedrock granite
in boulders that are
included in those volcanics down in those
areas, and we had some
4-H geology kids down there just a little
over a week ago that on
a field trip where they had actually collected
native volcanic
metamorphic rocks.
This is a follow-up question on the erratics.
I’ve never noticed
that as a casual person, what would you see,
what would you be
looking for if you’re in a glaciated area,
like, I mean north of
the river somewhere.
Is there someplace where you would see
that?
Yes.
Quite often you’ll see from gravel-size
up to boulder-size
these generally pink quartzites.
They were river sands that had
been metamorphosed into the quartzites and
if they have more iron
in them they may be purple.
If they have less oxidized iron
within them they may be as pale as white,
but they’re, quartzite
is very resistant to breakage and grinding
so it would actually
last better than the other type rocks around
it so it gets left
behind as a residual, particularly as weather
removes the soil
and gravels around it.
Also, sometimes you can find sort of
grayish-green rocks and these are referred
to as greenstones, and
these were ocean pillow lavas that were formed
3.8/3.5 billion
years ago up in what’s now Canada, the formation
of that area of
Canada, and the glaciers also ripped those
up and brought them
down.
So now you can find they call them a greenstone
and
generally if you break them open inside you
see the black basalt
that hasn’t been altered by weather to give
it that green shade.
Yeah, usually it’s unsorted.
It’s all kinds of sizes together
and those quartzite boulders come up from
the corner, northeast
corner of Iowa up into Minnesota and up into
the Dakotas.
A few years ago my wife and I went out to
Cheyenne Bottoms, very
surprised to find a huge wetlands in the middle
of Kansas.
Could
you talk a little bit about the geology of
Cheyenne Bottoms?
That’s been argued a great deal (laughs)
and apparently the
Cheyenne Bottoms is in a structural sink,
a declined area, and
the most likely explanation for this is more
soluble materials
have been eroded out from underneath that
area by ground water
and that’s allowed this basin to form and
develop, and it
probably removed halite or salt that was deposited
in the
formations below that.
But the strange part about it is the
structure of Cheyenne Bottoms itself.
Actually, it extends and
includes much older rocks than the rocks that
had the evaporites
in them.
So we never completely answered the question
of how
that formed.
Had some, a lot of interesting hypotheses
but as
the elderly lady in Missouri said when she
was calling her
husband “hypothesis” and the pastor said,
“Your husband’s George.
Why do you call him hypothesis?”
“Well, he never works”.
So
hypotheses are ideas that don’t have all
the information to call
them a theory.
How many of you are interested in Indian
artifacts?
The glacial material has also brought down
catlinite
and catlinite is Indian pipestone and some
of the tribes up in
Minnesota and Iowa in there had the rights
to go into the state
park up there and still quarry the catlinite
for their ceremonial
purposes, but you can actually find catlinite
within some of the
glacial tills.
It looks a lot like what people call jasper
but
it’s soft enough that you can scratch it
with a steel blade or a
knife or a nail, but glaciers are great.
They’ve brought all
this outstandingly strange geology into this
area for us to be
able to study.
And did the glaciers didn’t just like come
down from the north,
they started in different places and spread
out from there?
Yeah, depending on which way the ice would
move.
Some of it that
the ice load might move out to the west and
then circle around
and come back to the east from that direction,
or within the
glacial material across the northern part
of north, across the
United States, and particularly they found
diamonds in the
glacial material, very scattered, but by tracing
them back and
looking for minerals that are related to diamonds
in the pipes
they’re able to uncover the pipes up in
Canada and instead of a
volcano standing up, those soft kimberlite
pipes were eroded out
by the glaciers, so here you have all these
lakes up in the
wilderness area that overly these glacial,
these diamond-rich,
kimberlite pipes.
So really they’re going in and they’re
mining
under these lakes for the diamond production.
Where could we find a diamond, you say?
(Laughs).
You can also go down in Arkansas and try to
find
diamonds down there at the Crater of Diamonds
State Park.
You go
in and pay your fee and they have this field
out there that they
plow up occasionally that is the weathered
kimberlite material
and you can go out and dig for and see and
try to find diamonds.
Pat and I, we found sunburns while we were
there.
They’re very
rare but about the time we were leaving they
did blow the siren
saying someone had brought a diamond in to
be identified in the
headquarters, the museum area, and you get
to keep them.
Yeah,
there’s clays most everywhere.
Clays are a family of minerals
and then we also use clay as a term for very
small size
particles, but the clays are actually related
to the mineral
feldspar that you find in granites and a lot
of the other igneous
rocks.
As those weather and break down they change
the
structure.
They incorporate water into the structures
and you
start getting the clay minerals formed and
quite often the clays
are very platy and particularly kaolinite
is one of these that
the structures are fairly strong horizontally
but then they’re
weak between and they take in an awful lot
of water.
Oh.
That
could give you your shrinking and swelling
clays that you may
have trying to raise gardens in or have problems
with your house
with the clays moving.
Some of the real good clays—normally they
don’t settle out until the water is real,
real, has lost all its
forward motion, so it has to be still water
for the particles to
very slowly settle out because they’re so
small, and this might
happen in an ocean basin at the margin of
the ocean where clay is
laid down that later becomes shales and you
can also get clay
deposits in lakes, and I do know of a case
years ago back in the
50s.
There was a little tussle between the U.S.
and France so
they started raising tariffs on things and
something they decided
they could put a big tariff on but it wouldn’t
mean much, it
would be more figurative-type thing, was clays
for artistic use.
Southwestern College down at Winfield ran
out of clay and they
found out the tariff they would have to pay
on it would be about
ten times the cost of the clay they normally
imported from
France.
So the Art Department talked with one of the
geologists
that was teaching at that time and he said,
“You know, I vaguely
recall some mention of clay pits here on the
property”.
So they
went out on the backside or the west, east
side of the campus and
found some of these old clay pits and these
weathered Permian
shales actually were better quality clay than
what they’d been
importing from France.
Weathered Permian shale?
Permian shale.
Does that mean that
the, if I have this right, the swamp when
Canada when the area
was a swamp, then they became shale, and then
later that
weathered into clay?
Well, these clays were laid down at the margin
of the ocean when
it was hot, dry, and evaporated sea water.
Oh.
And these
particular clays were laid down at the margin
of that, compressed
into shale, but now that they’ve come back
to the surface and
eroded, as they’re eroding out the quality
of the clay was very
good for artistic uses.
They have been doing vertical fracking
in the oil and gas industry by going down
where the drill hole
went straight through the layers and then
they would frack those
to allow the oil and gas to come in easier.
But the big change
now, well it started that sort of fracking
in Kansas in 1948, but
this new change is where they’ve gone in
and they developed
technology to steer the drilling in such a
way that they can go
vertically, then kick over in a curve and
actually go
horizontally in thinner layers that hold oil
and gas.
Then they
go in and put those under pressure that fractures
the rocks up,
allows the oil and gas to move in, and they
put in sand to help
prop the stuff up, but the life of those type
of oil wells is
shorter compared to most vertical wells because
you’re draining
more of the formation in a short period of
time instead of having
it slowly migrate into a vertical-producing
well.
Now what
they’re saying with the fluids from that—some
of them are nasty.
For the most part we don’t have trouble
in Kansas and Missouri
with that because it’s being done deep enough.
Back east in
shallower areas they did have some problems
with people who
didn’t obey the rules.
This led to some of the contamination
problems.
Now, the fracking causing earthquakes.
It’s unlikely
to do it in oil field fracking.
It’s the fluids that get
injected, the increased amount of salt water
and other
contaminated fluids they’re pushing back
in because they’re
producing so much more.
Now this raises the hydraulic pressure
down underneath there.
If there’s already a fault or something
it tends to lubricate it and make it more
likely to move.
So
fracking itself normally won’t be an effect
of that in the
midcontinent region, but from those fluids
that they’re trying to
get rid of down the disposal wells.
This is just (recording cuts
off here), particularly saltwater and, pardon
me?
Do they bring it from the sea?
How does it get to the
midcontinent?
Well, that’s trapped in the rocks down there.
Oh.
It gets
produced along with the oil and gas.
Oh.
As that comes up you
separate it out and you have the oil and gas
you sell and then
you have to do something with the saltwater.
Yeah, they pump it
down what they call a, they either let it
flow freely down
disposal wells or if they’ve got a whole
lot of it and they’re in
a big hurry then they pump it down.
Now the pumping increases
the pressure and causes these problems we
think are leading to
the earthquakes.
Do you think that they’re going to have
any earthquakes where
they’re doing the fracking, the most fracking
today?
Well, that’s in Oklahoma right now.
It is?
They jumped from
what three earthquakes, three or four earthquakes
over a 4.0
Richter magnitude in about ten years, now
they’re talking about
two or three hundred a year.
Two to three hundred.
(Comment in
back, inaudible).
Yeah.
Between cigarette smoking and cancer?
Yes.
Yeah.
The oil
industry (smoking gun or what) has hired the
same lawyers from
the tobacco industry.
Would you like to make some comments about
the fossils on the
top?
Yeah.
This one, I drool over that.
This is one of the
saber-tooth cats.
I am not sure if this is the most recent one.
I hate to handle it in case I drop it, but
saber-tooth varieties
of cats have come and gone over the ages.
They even have some of
the predecessor creatures to the cats that
developed this type of
saber and basically these aren’t like our
modern biting cats that
have smaller stronger teeth that they’re
able to take on and bite
into.
They don’t like to but they can bite into
bone and do
quite a bit of damage that way.
Like the lions, they don’t try
to bite through somebody’s spine.
That’s liable to wipe out
their teeth, so they go in and try to go for
the throat to choke
them down or cause loss of blood.
Now the saber-tooth cats,
generally they have serrations along the backside
of the saber
and it’s also more knife-like.
So they’re more of an animal that
would go in and take down their prey by attacking
and ripping
into the flanks or the belly of their prey
and taking them down
by loss of blood and shock.
There have been cases of Smilodon in
which they’ve, that’s one of the most
recent of the saber-tooth
cats, that they find an elderly animal’s
fossil that the broken
sabers have possibly healed somewhat and been
rounded off by use,
so we think they lived in prides like lions
do and the other
members of the pride would be bringing in
prey and the elder
statesman shall we say was able to survive
that way.
There’s
also the dirt-toothed cats.
They have a smaller knife-like tooth
and they again, they’re more of a flank
and belly attacker than
they are trying to go for the front end, the
throat, or areas
where there might be large bones.
And this particular one, I’ve
tried to collect some of these out in western
Kansas.
This is a
cephalopod and you’re probably aware of
the cephalopods today
that we have like the squids, the octopus
(octopi), and these
would have these fancy shells this way.
The only curl, the only
shell coiled cephalopod we have today are
the nautilus, and you
see the nice nautilus shell they get from
the Pacific or the
Indian Ocean that they use for decorative
purposes.
This
character would start coiled out, then they
would start
straightening out and then start curling back,
and I believe
these are scapolites.
So here the animal would be up here with
these squid-like tentacles and these water
jet to move around,
and they think maybe this is a modification
to get the center of
gravity closer in so they’re more maneuverable.
Some of the
straight cephalopods may find evidence of
some of them up to 18
feet long.
So if they’re that straight it’s difficult
to steer.
Ammonites?
Yes, that’s, the first ones of those were
the nautilus that had
the most simple shell and they’re the ones
that have straight
petitions between the, where the animals have
grown and moved
forward, built more shell and then sealed
off the back.
But they
also have a sifuncal, a tube that goes all
the way back to this
initial chamber that they built back here
and they can use that
to adjust their buoyancy by moving saltwater
back into the
different segments, moving gas in and out,
and they can change
their balance with their nice even coil, then
the center of
gravity is real close into their tentacles
and it makes them much
more agile, being able to basically turn on
a dime, and then with
the tentacles some evidence of some of the
ancient cephalopods
that they may have had 20-30 foot tentacles.
Modern ones, of
course, have much shorter ones until you get
into the big squids.
Thank you so very, very much.
