Settled in the Interior Ocean

I just finished Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land, the 4th edition printing from University of Nebraska Press, a book that I had discovered from the bibliography of a JStor article. It was roughly 400 pages of highly detailed accounts of the scale of the problem associated with the area we unknowingly drove around back in December 2017.

Firstly, I always assumed the water table had reservoirs of water running underneath in carved out caverns. That isn't true. It's a lot like an Icee--imagine the granules of ice collected together, you stick a straw in it to drink the sugary syrup, the area around the straw becomes dry, and you have to place the straw in another area to keep removing syrup from more dry ice. The Ogallala Aquifer consistency is a lot like that. The aquifer has varying degrees of saturation at different depths. At the top, there is fine topsoil in some areas and finely granulated sand hill in others. Below is a gravelly bed of rocks that are packed together, with ancient glacial water melt in between the gaps.

Secondly, the book made me think of my son in the future. He could be witnessing the largest migration in human history away from the breadbasket of the United States. He could be witnessing the end of American imperial power as it lost its ability to grow and export cereal grains as food aid. He will be witnessing a human catastrophe on a scale never encountered. Our relatively comfortable lives of calorie excess can be attributed to the body of water that was under our feet without initial notice.

The soils of the central United States once were a vast inland sea, of which deep water covered the entire region off and on for fifty million years at a time. (Curtis Marbut, "Soils of the Great Plains.") This cyclical washing over of the land began 500 million years ago. The last great flooding of this region took place 90 million years, with its highest water mark 75 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period. At that time the Western Interior Seaway cut present-day North America in half, into an Appalachia Island to the east, and a Laramidia Island to the west.

The Hudson Bay in Canada is the last remnant of this ancient sea, but 75 million years ago this sea--1,000 miles wide and 3,000 miles long--reached through the great plains and connected the Gulf of Mexico. Each time it flooded, it laid down thousands of feet of sediment, later to be eroded when the sea drained, similar to how the land is eroding today as winds and rains slowly move the soil into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River. Ancient marine deposits would have made the great plains the highest place on earth if it wasn't for millions of years of erosion from water and wind when the land stood above the sea.

To the west, a vast swamp was situated on flat land where fossil beds of dinosaurs rest today. From this lowland marsh 200 miles to the west of the Western Interior Seaway a period known as the Laramide Orogeny occurred over 35 million years, uplifting the earth into the present day Rocky Mountain range and draining the Western Interior Sea into the Gulf of Mexico. When the high plains were emerging from the sea, no great mountain barriers existed to shut off the flow of moisture from the Pacific ocean. Damp air was able to flow through the region, as the ocean was much closer to the region, roughly at the present day Colorado Utah border. The region was a humid and semi-tropical with lush green vegetation.

The landscape was a high rolling country that was quickly eroded to a peneplain with its abundance of water. Valleys in this region were thousands of feet above sea level and mountain peaks a thousand feet higher. The continental backbone formed separating east from west of which this late Cretaceous geology can be seen in the stratum of the upper levels of Rocky Mountain National Park. These peaks lay half covered today in their own tailings, eroded from millions of years of rain, wind, and glacier. The grinding of this unfathomable tonnage of rocks grinds to dust slowly sliding down across the surface of the high plains towards the ocean.

Uplift from the rocky mountains created an ever so slight tilt to the land of the high plains of 15-20 feet per mile eastward. The upward rising of the Rockies caused a cooler climate cycle from one million years to roughly 100 years ago, creating a rainshadow over the present day great plains, making it considerably more arid and extreme in its temperature range. The summer melting flows from the Rockies deposited finely granulated sediment onto the surface of the plains. The Ogallala formation was a rather recent development in this incomprehensibly long sequence of events. A geologic incident approximately 10 million years ago quickly shifted the flows of rivers towards the basin, allowing the deep gravel beds to be saturated by fluvial deposition.

Just as quickly the rivers shifted again, diverting the flow of water away from the region.

"The high plains aquifer is like a flat, sandy beach where the tide has recently gone out; no new water comes in at the upper end, yet it is naturally draining out the lower end directly into streams and springs." (LOC425).

Despite no new water flowing into the formation, the scale of the aquifer is staggering. Originally, the Ogallala contained over three billion acre-feet of water (9.78 million gallons) under 174,000 square miles of land sprawling across the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The water is contained in deep gravel beds anywhere from 50 to 300 feet deep.

The aquifer varies drastically in saturation and depth of saturation in some areas the water is more accessible than others. The volume of water in the Ogallala is equivalent to Lake Huron. On an in-depth geologic timeline, the region oscillates between arid and lush, but the region's dryness is expected in the future on the timescale of human civilization of the next thousand years or more. The Ogallala is cut off from rivers that aided in its formation. It only means recharging happens through seasonal precipitation from year to year in a region that only receives 10-25 inches of precipitation. The high winds and dry air create a high rate of evaporation, and what is able to stay in the soil percolates through the many feet of topsoil and gravel beds, slowly recharging the aquifer at the rate of one inch or less per year if left alone by human exploitation.

The arid Great Plains have some of the best growing soils on the planet. An excellent growing soil contains a balanced level of chemical salts and the right amount of water saturation. Calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and hydrogen, nitrate and phosphate are necessary for the top six to eighteen inches of topsoil. Mixed with the right amount of moisture, exchanges between the roots of plants and the ingredients of the soil become possible. Every plant we consume depend on these electrochemical exchanges. As a secondary result, all the meat we grow to eat depend on the transfers consuming many plants inedible to humans. Animal and human survival depends on the process of ionization that allows plants to grow in soils with precise chemical composition.

"The balance is delicate; if the soil lacks a nutrient or has too many salts or if the moisture is too high or too low, plant growth is limited, as in the worn out land of Appalachia, or virtually nonexistent, as in Nevada's Great Basin." (LOC502)

Balanced soils are the long-term ecological capital that provided human civilization with stability for more than ten thousand years. Certain types of plants, like legumes, are filled with millions of bacteria that the plants give them energy through carbohydrates in their root structure. The symbiotic bacteria, in turn, capture bacteria from the air and place it in the soil for the plant's use; a process known as nitrogen fixing. Of the importance of this symbiotic relationship, biologist Peter Farb wrote, "Should some calamity overtake these bacteria or a sudden change occur in the environment of the planet, that their numbers might be so seriously reduced... The event would collapse our superstructure of life, which is hinged to the nitrogen-fixing by the microbes"(LOC518).

The fate of humanity is tied to the intricate balance of chemicals, salts, water, and a symbiotic microbiome, of which humankind frequently manipulates in fits of ignorance, flying the bullet without plans or understanding, merely reacting to the effects of induced modification. Some of humanity's best achievements have been through a complete lack of knowledge of the natural balance that is indifferent to our existence. We create solutions to problems that create more problems, which in turn create new solutions. What will be outlined are but a few of these manipulations on the Ogallala lands.

A significant part of the soil above the Ogallala aquifer is windblown dust, loess mantle, blown to the High Plains for the past million years from the crumbling rock of the Rocky Mountains by strong winds. Dust Bowl conditions aren't always entirely caused by human manipulation or poor land management. Over the past several thousand years, many dust bowls of transitory soil deposited the rich clay so prized by 19th and 20th-century farmers. The lands today are worth a premium for their dark brown fertile soils, some of the best in the world.

The rocky mountains provided the matrix of finely crushed pebbles and broken down minerals, but also there is a rich organic biome of bacteria, fungi, and microbes. Also present are insects, roots of native grasses, earthworms, and moles, continually enriching the soil with symbiotic microorganisms that make nitration of the earth possible for plant development. One acre on the Great Plains includes two and a half tons of plant material in the first six inches of soil (loc541).

The roots, in turn, absorb the nitrates and mineral compounds from the ground rocks, and anchor the plant and soils in the harsh winds. Early farmers learned quickly not to cut the native grasses to less than four inches above the surface, nor to allow their animals to overgraze on the grass. If the grass were no longer present, the topsoil would suffer, since the high grasses would provide the roots with sugar and starch. Prairie sod is an entire synthesis of these elements working harmoniously to create this cycle of seasonal growth and death each contributing to the fertile soils in a scarce water environment a harmonious compromise between all of the necessary ingredients for plant life.

The native short and long grasses create a buffer that allowed the fine rich topsoil to form gradually since the Pleistocene 2.6 million years to roughly 11,700 years ago. The gradual cycling of fine sands brought from the Rockies to the plains were protected under native grasses, taking much more time to form soil than in a moist climate. The millions of years of accumulation were incredibly easy to reverse by man. Some lands in panhandle Texas could initially yield 75 bushels per acre, but became mostly infertile and were vacated by the 1930s due to overfarming. In a soil survey guide of the period, it instructed farmers to:

"These soils need to be protected by a growing crop or a heavy stubble to help control wind erosion... Using a cropping system that fits the moisture condition. Fallow ¼ to ⅓ of the field... Wheat is likely to fail if it is sown in soil that is moist to a depth less than 24 inches. Delay tilling fields that have been left fallow, until the danger of soil blowing has passed in spring.... Strip cropping will help to reduce wind erosion, and the stubble will help conserve moisture by catching snow. Avoid excessive tillage and tillage that will leave the surface soil loose and powdery."

Farmers were reminded of good stewardship in the use of their soils, that proper usage was necessary and contingent on the high plains climate of low rainfall, high winds, and fluctuating temperatures of scorching summers and bone-dry and bones-deep cold. They needed to know what was the proper crop to plant according to the volume of the spring rains and if the rains came late or on time. The two main crops that were planted during this time were wheat or sorghum. Late spring rains were good for sorghum and late summer rains good for wheat.

"In late winter and early spring, strong winds rip and tear at the soil, and it must be protected. In summer, hot winds and low humidity bring high rates of evaporation."

Water was in short supply from the air but not from under the ground, thanks to the Rocky Mountain uplift and the glacial melt at the end of the Pleistocene. The Ogallala always enticed farmers with an endless supply of water 30-50 feet below the surface. However, until pumping technology could exploit this seemingly fathomless reserve, dryland farming was the only resort on the Plains. With dryland farming, farmers adjust their methods to protect the soil from the extremes of climate, to attempt to keep proper moisture in the soil. Such techniques are leaving crop residue, the debris from the previous plant, as ground cover to protect the soil from wind and evaporation.

Stubble mulching is done in conjunction with dryland farming, leaving the last cut crop low while leaving the root structure in the ground and leaving the residue over the stubble. Strip cropping was another technique where rows of different crops were grown on the same field and were harvested at different times as to create windbreaks and microclimates that would help with evaporation and windbreaks for soil erosion. Contour farming was another technique where crops were planted along the slopes of the farm. Despite all these dryland measures, " Farmers were warned that if there was not enough cover to protect the soil from wind and water erosion, emergency tilling, or roughening the surface with chisels, shovels, or listers, could provide quick protection, but it does not provide long-term benefits. It dries the soil and breaks down its structure." (586)

If conditions were too hot and dry to grow on the Plains, there was nothing a dry farmer could do to stop a crop failure. "There was a story of a plains farmer who, on being congratulated for a banner crop, grumbled, 'Yes, but look at what it did to the soil.' He was all too aware that his equipment, interest on his outstanding loans, his house, barn, and outbuildings, his own living costs, and any crop profit for the year were paid out of his soil fertility and that it had limited capital."(586)

The natural soil before the farmer arrived was so healthy that it could continue indefinitely, but once broken, had to be painstakingly manipulated and managed to maintain its nutrient health. Every year a plains farmer's land gives up a little nutrient capital that was developed in hundreds of thousands of years of the build-up of soil nutrition. The health of the soil is central in the farmer's ability to pay off the debt that it took to build that operation. The soil was so fine that any mechanical intervention sped up its degradation. Tilled up soil in heavy rain would aid in the easy penetration of the soil, turning it to mush, taking all the mineral salts and washing them to the river valleys and quickly out to sea. The stripping of essential nutrients would turn the soil highly acidic and unstable for planting. Nothing would grow on it, not even the native grasses responsible for protecting it in the harsh climate.

What is often unrecognized in temperate regions like midcontinent North America is that the extensive and dense root systems of natural grasses were instrumental in developing soils that were uniquely fertile and produced some of the most productive croplands in the world. Two hundred species of grasses could be called domesticated with only a dozen standing between us and starvation. The most important on this list is wheat, with rice and corn a close second, then followed by sorghums. They are rich foods, give high yields, are relatively easy to collect, travel well, and may be stored for long periods. Today more than 70 percent of the world's farmland is planted in cereals, to provide more than fifty percent of humanities calories. (Charles B Heiser Jr, Seed to Civilization: the story of Food LOC722)