An Empty Quarter
for Kansas?
The
Empty Quarter of Arabia is the world's largest sand desert.
Now the question arises: Could south central Kansas
become a desert? No way. But things could get a lot sandier down there
than they already are.
New evidence suggests it would take only a small climate
change to wreck the prairie grasses that hold the soil intact.
The sand dunes in south central Kansas apparently formed
within the past thousand years -- much more recently than previously
thought.
And they formed within the framework of a climate little
different from today's except for extended periods of drought, according
to a book recently published by the Kansas Geological Survey.
"If sand was blowing around significantly during the
last 1,000 years, it wouldn't take much of a climate shift to start
it moving again," said Alan Arbogast, the author of Late Quaternary
Paleoenvironments and Landscape Evolution on the Great Bend Sand Prairie.
Arbogast, once a KU geography graduate student, is a
geographer at Michigan State University.
Dunes on the Great Bend Sand Prairie were previously
thought to have formed more than 10,000 years ago. But radiocarbon dating
of organic materials in the sand and silt shows that the region was
probably an extensive wetland during the last Ice Age and that the modern
landscape is quite young.
The prairie lies south of a bend in the Arkansas River.
It covers 1,100 square miles in Stafford, Barton, Edwards, Kiowa, Pratt,
Reno and Rice counties.
Adapted from a story by Liz Brosius, editor of
GeoKansas: A
Place to Learn About Kansas Geology
from the Kansas Geological Survey
