Going, Going, Gone - Disappearing Streams
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to Planet the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
Chris Bolhuis: He, you got him. He got, he got Little Watson again. Um, here, let me adjust my microphone. I gotta get my radio voice on, but his head even hit the plant.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know he was a little, a little startled by that. Got him good.
Chris Bolhuis: It's [00:00:30] so good.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris, you were with your parents the other night, just recently, right?
Chris Bolhuis: I was,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: what did Joyce have to say about Planet Geo? What was the comment? Did she have any snide remarks for me?
And you know, just, or was she just pouring praise upon her son? How you're always right and you're always so good and, and everything you say is perfect.
Chris Bolhuis: No, she really didn't say a lot. She, she calls you the good old doctor. So
Dr. Jesse Reimink: good old doctor.
Chris Bolhuis: the, the good old Dr. Reimink, you know, that's how she always
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's pretty funny. [00:01:00] I like that. I like that. That's a pretty good one. I'll, I'll run with that.
Chris Bolhuis: but I will say the most impressive thing about having my mom and dad just stopped over. It was actually, it wasn't at night, it was in the morning.
They stopped over and Jenny and I are drinking coffee, sitting on our porch and, so I was showing 'em our new app. Right. Can I say that? Is that okay?
Okay. Yeah. So, I was showing them our new app, which is for you and I, Jesse, like, this is so exciting. Like it's a native app, it's downloadable, it's awesome, [00:01:30] like it looks so good and I'm showing them this.
And it's hard because I'm on my phone and my mom and dad are on either side of me and I'm like, ah, screw it. I'll just put it up on the tv. So I'm mirrored my phone with a TV and at that point, The whole discussion took a different turn because my dad was so impressed on how I was able to put my phone on the TV screen, and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so the app just went right over their head. Just who karstess about the app. It's just, well, how do we get their phone to the tv?
Chris Bolhuis: Well, no, [00:02:00] Joyce was on task. Joyce wanted to know about that. She was not as impressed with the TV thing, but my dad was highly distracted by the tv
so,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's great. I mean, in some ways, Chris, I always think back about this, like as we've gone through and building this app and working on it and stuff, you know, the technology is, is amazing. I just think it's, it's sort of like magic, you know, the fact that you can download gigabytes of our audio and videos and images and everything works together.
Compare that to, you know, when I was in high school and I had [00:02:30] the old Nokia flip phone, that was like a, the walkie-talkie style thing, like
Chris Bolhuis: Oh, I hated those. I never got one of
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, I
Chris Bolhuis: one of those Nextels, right. The next,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah, that's what it was. Nextel Direct
Chris Bolhuis: it was always like that. And it, I, every time that went off, I got so annoyed at whoever owned that phone. I'm like, really? You want a walkie talkie?
That's,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So it's like people walking around on FaceTime, screaming at the FaceTime these days. But I had one of those things, it was Bombproof. I worked as a [00:03:00] landscaper for many summers in high school and college, and that thing was robust. but you know, if you went back to that time, like whatever, 2005 or oh six or something, what we would have, Magic.
It would really feel like magic. Right. So, I don't know. It's a, it's kind of amazing. I dunno.
Chris Bolhuis: it is. It is. And it is in two. be fair, it's, gotta be hard to keep up, you know? I mean, you always rip on me about my lack of, technological skills, which I think is highly unjustified. [00:03:30] Um, it's just not, not, okay.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, Chris, hold on. We go back. Hold on. We had a conversation with Andrew Dewitt about how the fact that you ran out of Google Drive storage and you just deleted all your emails because of it. I mean, just, well, I just must delete all these emails.
Chris Bolhuis: Well, can I, I gotta ask a question
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that is the most old man move you've pulled in a long time though.
Chris Bolhuis: okay, well this, there's a backstory to this though. Like, have you ever looked at how many sent emails you [00:04:00] have or have you ever looked at that before?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah. Massive. I, but I want them, because sometimes I have to go back years to remind myself what I sent to somebody else.
Chris Bolhuis: Jenny got called out because at school, her school email, she had like 115,000 sent emails that go way back to 2008 and they're like, yeah, there's a teacher actually on staff.
They have this big staff meeting, you know? Yeah. One of our teachers actually has 115,000 sent emails going way back to 2008,[00:04:30] and Jenny's like, is that, that might be me. And it was, they were talking about her. And so that was in my head. And then I, I look at my like storage breakdown, you know, and I've got like, I dunno, seven gigabytes on Gmail.
And I'm like, I don't need all this stuff. So I just, I know it was an old man move. I own it. But there was
Dr. Jesse Reimink: it.
Chris Bolhuis: to it. I did, I did. And I
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, we, we had a, uh, this episode, this isn't quite an old man move, but we had a, a bit of a, well, [00:05:00] I don't know if a disagreement, not really a disagreement. We don't have those anymore. I don't think, we don't sort of break up over episode ideas, but we had two very different approaches to this episode to disappearing streams.
Right. what do you think about this? How do you, how do you frame this in your head?
Chris Bolhuis: This is really, really interesting. So you've pitched the idea of disappearing streams. You said, Hey, let's do an episode on this. We can rip this. No problem. We don't even need a script, you know? And I'm like, well, okay, but I'm gonna put a script together. So I wrote this [00:05:30] script on disappearing streams and I sent it to you, and then I said, Hey, it's done. Take a look at it. Let me know what you think. And then the next day you texted me back and said, yeah, I read through it, made some changes to it. I actually moved. You said something like, I moved quite a bit of it around, and I'm like, oh, okay. So that, that's code for Chris. That sucked And
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It
Chris Bolhuis: no, I didn't like your script.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: code for we came at. Came at it from very different perspectives perhaps.
Chris Bolhuis: [00:06:00] Yeah, so I get on my phone right away 'cause I'm, that really bothers me. And so I, I look at the changes and I'm like, oh wow, this is really interesting. Your idea of what a disappearing stream is was totally different than mine. I mean, we were related, but you put it under a bigger umbrella than I did.
So what do you think of. When you think of a disappearing stream,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Well, I think in this instance I thought of this episode idea for a very specific [00:06:30] reason. I was up, got back from, uh, vacation up in northern Michigan visiting with my family and my dad and I went out trout fishing. we're looking at this river that was back in like state gameland, that you had to like hike back through the swamp.
It's big swampy region, like cedar swamps up there. So, we were looking at the satellite image at like Google Earth, looking at this stream that we'd heard was a good trout stream. And we're looking at it and it looks beautiful. You know, it's like, I don't know, as wide as the road winding through this Cedar swamp thing.
And then all of a sudden I look at it and I know which [00:07:00] way's downstream and all of a sudden the stream. Disappears, well not really disappears. It branches into, go back to our stream. Drainage pattern episode. It branches into like a dendritic pattern, which is usually what happens going the other way.
Like the stream is growing upstream is dendritic, but in this case, downstream was dendritic.
Chris Bolhuis: so we call that a distributor network instead of a tributary network, right? And this is a common thing that you get in like a deltaic environment or you know, that kind of thing.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: exactly. But this was not [00:07:30] flowing into a, a, you know, a big lake or something like that. It was, it actually just disappeared and then a couple miles downstream it picked back up with this tributary network and then re aggregated into. A new stream, basically, like the stream disappeared. So I had this in my head when I was thinking about this.
I was like, wow, I've never seen a disappearing stream in a swamp like this. That's kind of cool. Oh, let's talk about disappearing streams and that that was distinctly different from what you initially thought about probably for a disappearing stream.
Chris Bolhuis: Right, because when I go, [00:08:00] when I, my, when my mind goes to disappearing streams, I think of the Black Hills or I think of specific places that, where they're called disappearing streams. With your scenario, I don't lump that into a disappearing stream thing. I call that a losing stream. We're gonna get into all of this in here, here in just a minute, but I think that it's a really interesting thing that our vocabularies, our schema for how we think about these things was really different. And that's, that's so interesting. It's a good thing we came up with a[00:08:30]
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It, it is a good, good idea. Could I, if we would've just sat and, you know, uh, tried to record this, we would've argued a bunch. so how about this, Chris? How about I'll, because my schema was the broader one. I'm not saying this is the right one, but the broader one, and you really focused on the main really.
the dominant part of a disappearing stream, like my schema is a little bit broader, included a couple things like losing streams and influence streams. I'll introduce that first, and then what, what we're really gonna focus on is the sort of quote unquote, classic disappearing stream in karst, [00:09:00] topography, karst setting.
So, Does that work? Is that okay if I introduce the, the sort of one I was thinking of as the umbrella term here? So, So disappearing streams, are often categorized together, sometimes with losing streams or what we call influence streams. And these are streams where the amount of water flowing through the stream is decreasing. So it's losing, it's not gaining, the stream is not gaining water and growing and growing and growing. It's losing it. That's a losing stream. And a disappearing [00:09:30] stream is one where it goes completely away.
in my mind, it was a subcategory.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Can I just re-explain what you just said in a little bit of a different way? A lot of streams, particular where you and I are from Pennsylvania, Michigan, we have what are called gaining streams. And what that means is that the stream is getting fed by groundwater. Many different places. and so, the stream bed is at or near the water table right there, that local water table.
So it's just being fed by it. Now, if the water table [00:10:00] lowers below the bottom of the stream channel, the stream can then seep water out at the bottom of the stream down to the water table. and that's called a losing stream.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, so let me just describe that, Chris. That was a great intro to like how the water table relates here. So envision a stream, like a cross section of a stream where a stream is sitting in a valley. The stream's down in the bottom of the valley.
If you look at the groundwater, if we were to sketch, so we got the topography, the hills are slurred of going down in, and then the bottom of the, of the V-shaped [00:10:30] valley, there is a stream down there. If we were to draw the water table on there, the water table would be up in the hills and it would kind of slope down towards the actual level of the stream and the water table would intersect.
The stream height at the surface, the stream level, the stream water height is defined by where the groundwater intersects the surface. So that's like the stream height. Now what you're saying is you drop that water table for many reasons. You can drop the water table, and now the stream water is above the water table [00:11:00] and it'll eventually over time, bleed water into the groundwater.
The groundwater will consume the stream water, the surface water, and it'll be a losing stream.
Chris Bolhuis: that's more of the situation that was going on where you happened to be, which you can talk about more in detail if you want, but that's a losing stream. It's losing water to the water table. I guess in my mind I classify that and I teach about, I teach this in my, in my Geology class.
Do you teach this with yours? Losing streams. Gaining streams, and so on. Okay. I just never referred to [00:11:30] those as disappearing streams. a disappearing stream is a subset of, of a losing stream. You know, it's like this broader category and a disappearing stream to me was a much more specific kind of niche
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. So I'll list these three settings. Two of them are very simple. One of them is one we're gonna spend a lot of time on in disappearing
Chris Bolhuis: Okay.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the three broad settings that we find losing streams or streams that are losing water as you go downstream, arid environments. This one's kind of [00:12:00] obvious, I think if it's super dry, the water taper drops, especially seasonally, and the stream can lose water both to evaporation and to the groundwater table.
So really arid environments. This is where we get ephemeral streams where. In the rainy season, there's a stream there and the dry season, it's just a dry riverbed. Water table changes. So places where the water table changes frequently, and where I was in this Cedar Swamp that was a place where the water table was changing.
So the reason that stream died away. And went into this, dendritic pattern and [00:12:30] died away is there's a slight elevation in the land and the water table will remained the same. So the stream kind of flowed into this land and the water went into the groundwater. Uh, and then on the other side of this little, little slight hill, it picked back up again.
So it kind of floated into the hill.
Chris Bolhuis: before it picked back
up.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: was like maybe a, a mile, maybe, but you
know, it, it was,
Chris Bolhuis: That's further than what I would've imagined.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, you kind of had this, these sort of dendritic patterns, uh, sort of facing each other. Ex exactly. Reverse and then dendritic. Right? Um, [00:13:00] and so that's just water table changes due to topography or due to sort of variations in the subsurface Geology, perhaps those are kind of obvious.
I think Chris,
Chris Bolhuis: Did the stream ever go away completely?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: it did
Chris Bolhuis: it just get down to like It
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, it completely went away into like the, and it, it sort of decayed in these little rettes, and then you couldn't see it for maybe half mile or mile. There was no stream, and then all of a sudden it picked back up again. because of this little slight change in topography, the third setting where we find losing streams, and this is where, you teach as purely, you know, [00:13:30] The classic disappearing stream category would be karst settings and karst settings are, this is where we live in Pennsylvania, where Penn State is, is, is a super karst setting right now.
Usually under lane by easily dissolved rock types.
Chris Bolhuis: Do you have a lot of disappear streams then in your area? in the way that I think about them.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: There, there are some, they're usually pretty small, like almost unnamed things. The bigger ones are usually, not disappearing. So yeah, so that's where this karst [00:14:00] settings category number three. This is where we're gonna spend most of the time this episode. So
Chris Bolhuis: Okay, so just to recap, we got arid settings like desert, really, really dryers with a super low water table then, and number two was the changes in the water table, which is what you experienced up in the north woods of Michigan. And then the third is a karst setting, which is. Gonna involve limestone or some other highly soluble rock.
and so where you have li, you know, you get sinkhole then where [00:14:30] the limestone collapses down in on itself. And, if you have a lot of those sinkhole, we call that in Geology, karst topography
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's exactly right.
Chris Bolhuis: So those are the three.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yep. So lead us in Chris to karst settings, and we're back to sort of, uh, now we're back to sort of the, the initial, the initial version there, here, what, you know, what you're, what you sort of thought about here and how do you teach karst in your class, or how do you teach disappearing streams within karst?
Because we kind of have to introduce karst, I think, right?
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, so when I think of disappearing streams, My mind always goes to [00:15:00] areas where you have limestone right at or near the surface. And so the Black Hills comes to mind. There are lots and you know, you and I, we love the Black Hills and this is just one more reason why we love 'em because you get this really kind of niche setting where these rivers are doing weird things.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: me interrupt real quick. Chris, I, I need to qualify this 'cause I don't love limestone and I don't wanna have a reputation that I love limestone. So we love the Black Hills, at least for me. I love the Black Hills because of the, the [00:15:30] karst topography is beautiful and the disappearing streams and all that are beautiful.
I don't really love limestone. Like, I think it's kind of a boring rock, to be honest. It's only interesting 'cause it dissolves. What do you, how do
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I don't know. Well, you know how I feel about limestone. Limestone is really one of the most difficult. It does, but it's really one of those difficult rocks to identify because it has so many looks. Remember I call this to Katy Perry of of
rocks,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: true. That's true. I forgot about that. The Katy Perry of rocks. [00:16:00] Chris, see above Chris's old man's status. He can't identify Katy Perry or
Chris Bolhuis: I cannot, I come on I'm not the only one out there that, that has a hard time. Katie Perry has so many different looks. She changes her hair color and all. Jenny gets so mad at me when we talk about this. I'm like, know, I'm like, who's that on the tv? She's like, it's Katie, Perry, Chris.
And then, you know, she'll be back on five minutes later and she looks completely different. I'm like, who? Who's that? then it's on, it's just
Dr. Jesse Reimink: watching like a Super Bowl halftime show with you must be so
Chris Bolhuis: [00:16:30] Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Just.
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, just spending time with me is entertaining, and you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That is true. That is very true.
Chris Bolhuis: yes. Okay. I think of, I think of the why. First of all, hold on.
Why are you so anti limestone? What's your, what's your
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I don't know. I just, I don't find it interesting. I just don't find it interesting. there are certain categories of limestone that are really beautiful and quite cool, and it's obviously super, super important from like a process level, but
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I. If you're telling me that we're gonna go like bang around in limestone for a while, I'd be like, oh my goodness.
That [00:17:00] sounds tedious. I would rather map almost any other rock than limestone.
Chris Bolhuis: can I give you some redeeming qualities of limestone? Limestone is a. Rather tough sedimentary rock as opposed to a lot of the other ones. And so it can form beautiful canyons and it leads to waterfalls and things like this. So some of my favorite places where you get these just beautiful cliff steep walled, unbelievable canyons are because of limestone and dole [00:17:30] stone.
And so I like that. it's also. What leads to caves, and I like those too. And, and you get beautiful features inside of 'em. And so, so limestone can be a cool rock. It has redeeming qualities.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so you just brought up something that I think is a little counterintuitive. You just said that limestone is quite a durable rock and forms cliffs often, but what we're talking about here is that karst settings. Where, rivers are disappearing into the ground include limestone. So those two [00:18:00] are kind of, there's a tension there between those two, I think.
And the reason is that limestone is very soluble, it's very durable. it is resistant to physical weathering, very resistant to physical weathering. In an arid environment. So out west, the Black Hills, grand Canyon, places like that, where there's not a lot of rainwater, limestone will form cliffs.
It's really durable. Out here in Pennsylvania, we've talked about this before, where we get a lot of rain. All the valleys are where the limestone is because limestone is very soluble. Any bit of rainwater will [00:18:30] quite easily start to dissolve limestone, so it's chemically really easily dissolved.
And that brings us back to why it's important for, karst settings and disappearing streams.
Chris Bolhuis: Very good point. And I just wanna say that something that I do in my Geology classes is I'll take a little chunk of limestone at the beginning of the year and I'll put it in a little Petri dish, you know, a little chemistry Petri dish. And I'll cover it in Mountain Dew. And just let it sit.
And then it just, it just goes away. The Mountain Dew is acidic enough to make short work of that [00:19:00] limestone,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Okay. There we go. So that brings us, so, so bring us back to the, chemistry, you know, out in the world. Not Mountain Dew, but like, you know, make that connection between the Mountain Dew and Rainwater.
Chris Bolhuis: Oh yeah. So rainwater natural, pure water as a neutral pH. It's not acidic, it's not basic, it's just seven pH, but there's karstbon dioxide in the air, and when C O two dissolves in water, it forms a very weak acid called karstbonic acid.
And then, as it hits the ground and seeps into the soil, there's more karstbon dioxide [00:19:30] in the soil and it gets a little bit more acidic. And so when you take vast volumes of, of water moving through massive amounts of rock and the water, slightly acidic, it'll just slowly over geologic time go to work and dissolve that
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. Gotcha. That's a great description. Yep, great description. So over time, and especially in areas where like you have a more acidic rain, you know, northeast of the United States has this historic legacy of, of mining and, And machineries and, and, uh, c o [00:20:00] two, lots of c o two in the atmosphere.
uh, a a bit more acidic, rainwater, we'll dissolve this stuff really easily. So, this kind of brings back to why disappearing streams are important because karst, topography is defined by a whole bunch of sinkhole. it, it has big vertical sections, Basically there's an underground cave that collapses.
That's kind of what a sinkhole is in a very simplistic sense. Like you have this area in the ground where. It's being dissolved by groundwater flowing through. The rocks are being dissolved. Eventually gets [00:20:30] to a point where it cannot support the land above it and it collapses down into itself. And Chris, this is quite.
Funny, I suppose at the time of recording, it's kind of funny 'cause nothing bad has happened yet, but just the other day on Penn State's campus, we are sitting in a valley Happy Valley. We've got sandstone ridges to the east and west, north and south, and we're sitting in this valley that's mostly karstbonate and it's a valley because the karstbonate, it's rainy, lots of groundwater.
the stuff is dissolving quite quickly [00:21:00] on our campus right next to one of the. Big major parking decks on campus. A sinkhole appeared last week. I kid you not, a new sinkhole appeared and everybo, we had to close the parking deck for days. I don't know the results of what the engineers have thought about this, but a sinkhole just randomly appeared
Chris Bolhuis: do you think, do you think the sinkhole was related to the limestone or, because you can get sinkholes too if you have like a, a leak in a water pipe. Just washes away sediment and the, the, the sand around it and so
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I [00:21:30] think this is almost always, these are bedrock. Bedrock is not very deep in the area. 'cause Penn, so Penn State, the campus is, it's in a big valley, but it kind of sits on a little ridge within the valley, in town there. So it's kind of elevated above it. And, and so bedrock is not that deep down.
So it's definitely related to karst. And this happens fairly frequently in the, in the Happy Valley area
Chris Bolhuis: Interesting. Cool.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: kind of appearing.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay, well let's get into a little bit of the rock types involved and then we'll talk about the main Rock type involved and why it is, [00:22:00] when I think of rocks that are soluble in acidic water, four types of sedimentary rocks come to mind. Would you agree with that? Like you got you tracking with me?
Okay. Dole stone and limestone, and these are really similar. Okay. Dole Stone is. It's a common sediment, your rock, and a little bit harder to dissolve than limestone because it has magnesium, calcium karstbonate in it, and the magnesium makes it less reactive and so on. So, it is a soluble rock [00:22:30] nonetheless.
So Dole stone limestone, and then you have two others that are fairly common. I think most people have heard of 'em. Gypsum and rock salt. Okay.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the dole stone and limestone are, are the big dogs here? They're by far the most common sedimentary, uh, rocks of these four. Well, because these are deposited chemically in the ocean basin and there's a lot more calcium that forms with karstbonate than, you know, there is haylight that form salt or rock salt, and gypsum.
Those things form in, in more [00:23:00] niche geologic environments, whereas limestone and dle stone form huge masses. They're currently forming in the ocean basins right now. So the. They're very, uh, readily deposited in a lot of geological environments that are very prevalent on earth.
Chris Bolhuis: And of the two Dole, stone and limestone. Limestone is the one that is almost always gonna be related to sinkholes and karst, topography, and so on, because it is much more soluble than Dole Stone is. It's more reactive, one, it's super, [00:23:30] super common. And two, it's highly dissolvable in acidic groundwater, which we already talked about.
So
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So that crisp really nicely brings us to, I think, The obvious conclusion here of like how a disappearing stream forms is if you have an an area where streams are flowing through and then sinkholes are forming and sinkholes can be connections to underground cave systems.
Basically, you
Chris Bolhuis: Or just networks where the water can, you know, kind of trickle and spread out [00:24:00] right through this limestone.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So you could see how a sinkhole could form near a stream and kind of capture the stream, and then the stream flows into the ground and becomes a subterranean river system. And eventually it'll sort of fill up that, system and might appear reappear downstream further away.
So it's, I think we've kind of gotten to that point where it becomes kind of obvious how a disappearing stream is actually forming.
Chris Bolhuis: It can be really dramatic. And you know, I talked to you about my feelings toward the [00:24:30] Black Hills and you get disappearing streams there because there's limestone exposed at the surface and, and you know, whenever you have that, you have the potential for this kind of stuff. But then there's another place that I'm very familiar with and I think you are as well, because I took you there when you were a young high school student.
On my science class, we went to a place called Sinks Canyon
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: Lander, Wyoming.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So where, where was that again? Where is I, I have this in my head 'cause this was the first time I'd ever heard of a disappearing stream when my dad ran this Geology [00:25:00] trip That the Summerside trip. I, I remember this as a little kid seeing it and I guess, did you see it as a little kid too, Chris?
Or not Sinks Canyon. Okay. Did it, did it like for me, it just stuck in my head. Like disappearing streams have always really stuck in my head because of this Sinks canyon. And did you say it's in Wyoming? I
Chris Bolhuis: It's in Lander, Wyoming, or near Lander, Wyoming. It's Sinks. Canyon State Park, near Lander, Wyoming. And it's really dramatic because you have this really fast moving stream. [00:25:30] It's called the Papo River. It's one of the most mispronounced rivers. You would just annihilate the name of this if you just looked at the spelling because you really bit Yeah, that's right.
'cause it's spelled P O P O and then space, and then a G I E. So it's, but it's pronounced Papo. It's a Native American thing. And so anyway, this river is just slicing through this Madison limestone. it's very big, it's very fast, it's powerful river, lots of whitewater and so on. [00:26:00] And then it just dumps into this sinkhole.
The river disappears. really dramatic, you know, it's, it's going fast and it's gone. And every time I'm there, I look at it, I'm like, how is this water entering the ground so fast? 'cause it's there and then it's gone. it's a very impressive phenomenon. And, and so yeah, that's all that it's doing.
It's just dumping into the sinkhole and this limestone then subsurface, subterranean, limestone. Has this very intricate network [00:26:30] where water then just, know, kind of seeps out kind of in this distributor way as well, and a quarter mile downstream. The water then reappears. So we call it, the sink is where it dumps into the sinkhole and then they call it the rise there where the water comes back up.
And it's only a quarter mile but when it comes back up, it's very slow. It's very calm. trout love to hang out there. People throw breadcrumbs into the water all the time. It's, [00:27:00] it's just a, it's just a very dramatic scene there in a very short amount of time. Now, what do you think about time?
How long does it take, do you think, for the water? To travel through this intricate subterranean network and then rise back up through the limestone. It's only a quarter mile.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I mean, you.
Chris Bolhuis: how would you test this,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, you would think it's fairly quick, but I think this is, this brings up a, a really good point about how disappearing streams can [00:27:30] totally change the river system. Like how much sediment a river is karstrying. So what is it for, for, uh, sinks Canyon?
Chris Bolhuis: It takes about two hours for it to come back up through the rise. It only goes a quarter mile. Now this water, the way it's going before it dumps into that sink, it would take just a few seconds to travel a quarter mile. You know it because it's really moving that fast. That takes over two hours for it to come back up.
And the, the way they know this is they just dumped green dye [00:28:00] into the sink. Waited for the die to show back up in the rise.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh man. I mean and you could see, like you described earlier, how it's just raging beforehand and then it goes down into the, into the groundwater and then it comes back up and it's a, a much calmer, totally different character of a river. And this is kind of like, The inverse of what happens when you put a dam somewhere, right?
the dam stops the river, makes it really calm upstream, and then it's raging. We talked about hungry water on the downside, on the downstream side of a dam, a river is hungry water. Whereas here [00:28:30] it's kind of inverted. It's a bit more hungry upstream for at least a little while, and then it becomes calmer downstream because it's sort of restarting.
It's seeping out of the groundwater. again, upstream
Chris Bolhuis: to me, the fact that it takes two hours says a lot about what. The limestone must look like in the subterranean view. It's gotta be a very intricate network of avenues for the water to travel through, and it really dramatically slows it down.
But it also speaks to, you know, how over geologic [00:29:00] time, this is gonna lead to the enlargement of openings and then future caves. This is an ongoing process then between the sink and the rise. Does that make
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah, absolutely. and these things can be, can be really important, for many reasons. for instance, the Danube, which I think many people have heard of, the Danube, it's a historically relevant river in Europe. It's actually the second largest river in Europe, but it is a disappearing stream.
On the upstream side, it disappears into a sinkhole and then reappears [00:29:30] 7.5 miles downstream again, in a series of these seeps or groundwater springs. And I mean, this is a huge river, a very, very long, very important river that flows through 10 countries and it disappears at some point, right? Like that's interesting.
These things are really, they're interesting and cool and important and, It just goes to show that really big rivers can disappear as well.
Chris Bolhuis: and another. Example of this in the Black Hills, which is much less dramatic than Sinks Canyon. these rivers [00:30:00] they've down cut into the limestone and then it looks somewhat like what you described up in northern Michigan. It just kind of, then slowly, maybe over a quarter mile or so, the water will just seep down into the limestone and go subterranean, and then it will pop back up.
Somewhere downstream. It's, it's very common, but it's a lot less dramatic. And the other thing, Jesse, is if you think about the number of rivers, at least in the United States that are named [00:30:30] Lost River,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, yeah, for sure.
Chris Bolhuis: amount,
right?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, if you just type in Lost River, I did this exercise 'cause I was like curious about this. There's some in New Hampshire, there's some in Michigan, there's the, the more, I mean maybe arguably a, more famous one in Kentucky, there's just lost rivers everywhere, like, and usually these are either losing or disappearing and many of them will be disappearing streams.
Chris Bolhuis: that's right. Now, hey, we got some flack because we need to talk more about stuff outside of the [00:31:00] us so can we give our friends on the other side of the pond another example, Jesse of a, of a lost river or disappear stream.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: we can try. I, forgive me, uh, these, you know, our English listeners, this pronunciation might not be great. River Lath, kill lath, kill lath, kill something in Derby Shire, England is another disappearing stream, and there's a whole bunch Any place where I think, you know, in the UK this would be a pretty common phenomenon just because of the amount of limestone and the topography there.
You can see why Germany [00:31:30] has a dispr stream as well in this region because there's a lot of limestone around. So anytime you have limestone, you have a lot of water, a lot of karst topography, this can happen and usually it will happen.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. Well, hey, what do you think, Jesse? Have we done justice to
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Uh, yeah, you know what? And we managed to get on the same page, I think too, even though we came at it from pretty disparate places.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Oh, disparate.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Disparate another word for you.
Chris Bolhuis: pronunciation on that. Is that, is that [00:32:00] right? Disparate.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Disparate. Yeah. I think disparate,
Chris Bolhuis: Disparate. Okay.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: coming at it from
Chris Bolhuis: You, oh my gosh, you are a funny guy. You know that,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I try to
be,
Chris Bolhuis: do you say the word wilt? I,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, I don't say wilster whilst
Chris Bolhuis: you just strike me as a person that would say
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I might. Well, you know, I'll get my, uh,
Chris Bolhuis: out every now and then.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: only when I'm wearing my sport coat with the leather patches on the elbows, then I will,
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, so you strike me as the [00:32:30] kind of person, especially when you're feeling extra doctory, that you would wear one of those peaky blinder hats. I don't know what they're called, but that's, that's the what I'm going with.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I, I don't have one actually, unfortunately.
Chris Bolhuis: will you wear it when we
Dr. Jesse Reimink: What I do have is, um, I have what's called a stormy Cromer, and, uh, those are, they're kind of similar. I think it's like, but they're made in, I think they're made in Minnesota or something, but they're kind of similar to, to that style of hat.
but they have
ear. They have ear flaps that [00:33:00] pull, that pull down. So it's like a winter, it's like a winter cap. And, uh, I, I take some heat for when I'm out there. Here's when I wear it, Chris. I wear it when I'm feeling quite fancy, very doctory, and I'm going fly fishing and, you know, I gotta put on some tweed.
I need to get like a tweed vest or something like that, that I can wear as well. And when it's a little chilly out, I'll put my stormy chromer on and go out there and.
Chris Bolhuis: So I wonder if the hat is called a kromer.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I don't think so. I don't know. You know me, I don't know style, but I think they're different enough to have a different name. But
Chris Bolhuis: at your house right [00:33:30] now? Do you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'll, I'll, I'll bring it next time we record. How about that? I think it's, uh, I think I'll bring it to the next recording. I'll wear it
Chris Bolhuis: Okay, I gonna hold you to that. I wanna record a whole session with you wearing your hat,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'll put my sport jacket with the leather patches on. I'll maybe get a
Chris Bolhuis: Do you have one of those too?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: oh yeah. Oh yeah. We gotta have those When you gotta, when you gotta be pretentious.
Chris Bolhuis: that is so good. I can't wait. I cannot wait.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Uh, it'll be great.
Chris Bolhuis: deal. Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: maybe to, yeah. Cla very, very classic. [00:34:00] All right. Hey, well, if you like Planet Geo, if you like hearing about disappearing streams and all things Geology, give us a like, and a review and a rating on your podcast platform that really helps the algorithm. And the last thing, send us an email, planet Geo cast@gmail.com or go to our website, planet Geo Cast there.
You can donate, you can subscribe, and you can see all of our past episodes.
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Peace.
[00:34:30]
