What JUST EMERGED In Kansas Is Impossible To Believe!

Kansas is probably not the state you'd expect to surprise you. Most people picture wheat fields, endless highways, flat prairie, and a horizon that barely changes for hundreds of miles. But that's exactly why what's hidden here is so unexpected. Western Kansas is losing an enormous supply of groundwater beneath its farms. Central Kansas sits above ancient salt formations that can dissolve underground. Northeastern Kansas contains the remains of volcanic activity. Western rock formations preserve giant predators from an ocean that disappeared roughly 80 million years ago. And in southern Kansas, previously quiet faults suddenly began producing clusters of earthquakes. Some of these features are hundreds of millions of years old. Others are changing right now. Today on DiscoverTube, We're uncovering 20 things hidden across Kansas that completely contradict what this state looks like from the highway. And before we start, here's the question. Which sounds least believable for Kansas? Buried volcanoes, prehistoric sea monsters, disappearing rivers, or earthquakes triggered by changes deep underground? By the end, you'll have the answer. Topic one, the water disappearing beneath western Kansas. The first surprise is enormous, invisible, and directly beneath some of America's most productive farmland. Under western Kansas lies part of the High Plains Aquifer. Across eight states, this groundwater system covers approximately 175,000 square miles. More than 95% of the water withdrawn from it is used for irrigation. That water helped transform dry sections of the Great Plains into highly productive agricultural land. But there was a problem. Water was being pumped out much faster than nature could replace it. Large-scale irrigation expanded rapidly after the 1940s and 1950s. USGS hydrologist Virginia McGuire and other researchers have since used thousands of well measurements to reconstruct what happened underground. By 2013, USGS estimated that recoverable groundwater storage across the High Plains Aquifer had declined approximately 267 million acre-feet from pre-development conditions. That's roughly 87 trillion gallons. And southwestern Kansas contains some of the most dramatic losses. Measurements have documented groundwater level declines of approximately 50 to more than 150 feet in certain locations. Yet you could drive directly above one of these areas and see almost nothing unusual. That's what makes the change so easy to underestimate. A hidden surface beneath the ground has effectively moved downward by the height of a multi-story building, and in some areas of western Kansas, less than 40% of the original aquifer thickness remains. Kansas looks flat and unchanged. Its underground water map tells a completely different story. Topic 2. Kansas is sitting above an ancient sea of salt. Central Kansas hides something completely different, salt, not a thin layer, an enormous geological formation extending beneath approximately 27,000 square miles. The Hutchinson salt member formed during the Permian period when ancient seawater evaporated and left thick deposits behind. Around Hutchinson, the formation reaches a gross thickness of roughly 350 feet, including shale and anhydrite layers. Portions of the deposit occur hundreds to more than 2,500 feet underground. And here's where things get interesting. Salt is extremely stable when it remains isolated underground. Add circulating water and everything changes. The salt dissolves. Material gets carried away. Underground openings can expand. Eventually, the sediments above them may begin to sag or collapse. Kansas Geological Survey researchers have have documented dissolution and subsidence associated with soluble rocks across the state. So underneath perfectly ordinary fields can be a geological material slowly disappearing into groundwater. And occasionally, the surface reveals what's happening below. Topic three, thousands of lakes can appear and then vanish. Now head west again. After heavy rain, something strange can happen in the high plains. Water collects in shallow depressions known as playas. For a short period, a lake appears. Then it disappears. But that disappearing water can have an important destination. USGS researchers Jason Gurdack and Kasia Rowe reviewed more than 175 scientific publications examining playas and groundwater recharge across the high plains. Their analysis found that recharge beneath playas can be one to two orders of magnitude greater than recharge beneath surrounding uplands. So a temporary lake that looks insignificant from the surface can become a concentrated gateway into an enormous groundwater system. Rain falls. Water collects. It infiltrates through sediment. Some eventually reaches the aquifer below. The playas aren't enough to replace everything being pumped from the high plains aquifer. But they're proof that Kansas' surface and underground landscape are far more connected than they appear. Sometimes a lake disappearing isn't the end of the story. It's the beginning of an underground one. Topic 4. A major river can practically disappear. The Arkansas River looks impressive on a map. In parts of western Kansas, the reality can be shocking. USGS hydrologist Kyle Juracek investigated declining stream flow across southwestern Kansas. In heavily pumped areas, groundwater had declined approximately 50 to more than 150 feet since intensive development began. And the river responded. At Syracuse, average annual Arkansas river flow was approximately 232 cubic feet per second between 1951 and 1969. During 1970 through 1979, it averaged only around 85 cubic feet per second. That's a decline of roughly 63%. Other USGS research documented groundwater declines of 20 to 80 feet between 1974 and 1980 in heavily pumped portions of southwestern Kansas. Much of the Arkansas River within that study area was described as dry. The reason is surprisingly simple. Rivers and aquifers aren't separate. When groundwater stands high enough, it can feed a river from below. Lower the aquifer far enough, and that contribution disappears. So one of Kansas' biggest surprises isn't simply that a river can dry up. It's that the cause can be dozens of feet beneath it. Topic 5, the underground salt world beneath Hutchinson. The Hutchinson salt becomes even stranger once humans enter it. Near Hutchinson, enormous chambers have been excavated directly into deposits created by an ancient Permian Sea. Hundreds of feet underground, the environment is naturally dry and remarkably stable. That stability has made portions of Kansas' underground salt environment valuable for long-term storage. It's an almost surreal contrast. Above ground, ordinary Kansas. Below it, gigantic artificial chambers cut through the remains of an ocean that vanished hundreds of millions of years ago. And depending on how groundwater interacts with the same formation, salt can either remain extraordinarily stable or slowly disappear. Topic 6, the mile-wide depression that looks like an impact crater. Then there's Big Basin. In Clark County, otherwise familiar prairie suddenly drops into an enormous depression roughly a mile across and around 100 feet deep. From above, it can resemble an impact crater, but no asteroid made it. The feature is associated with dissolution and subsidence involving soluble material underground. Rock disappears. Support weakens. The overlying landscape adjusts downward. Eventually, an underground process produces something enormous enough to reshape the surface. Big Basin is exactly the kind of place that catches people off guard because nothing around it prepares you for what suddenly appears in the prairie. And the bottom contains another surprise. Topic seven, the permanent water hidden inside Big Basin. At the bottom of Big Basin is St. Jacob's Well. In a landscape capable of becoming extremely dry, this persistent body of water seems almost out of place. But groundwater explains it. For early travelers, dependable water sources like this could be critical. For modern researchers, springs and groundwater-fed pools provide clues about what's happening below. Water chemistry can reveal which minerals groundwater encountered. Water levels can reveal changes in storage. And the location of a spring can help reconstruct underground flow. What looks like an isolated pool may actually be the visible end of a much larger hidden system. Topic 8. Kansas has buried volcanoes. This might be the last thing you'd expect beneath Kansas. Evidence of volcanic activity. Around Riley and Marshall counties in northeastern Kansas are unusual igneous structures, including kimberlite pipes and related intrusions. They date to roughly 90 million years ago. Magma once forced its way upward through Earth's crust. Explosive activity created pipe-like structures. Millions of years of erosion later, the dramatic volcanic landscape is gone, but its underground plumbing remains. Kimberlite is particularly famous because formations elsewhere in the world can contain diamonds carried upward from great depths. Kansas never became a major diamond district, but that's almost beside the point. A landscape now associated with farmland once had magma violently moving toward the surface. That's not the Kansas most people picture. Topic 9. Kansas suddenly started shaking more often. Another surprise appeared much more recently. Earthquakes. For decades, south central Kansas wasn't known for frequent significant seismic activity. Then earthquake numbers increased sharply. Between 2013 and 2016, Harper and Sumner counties experienced a major rise in seismicity. USGS researchers compared earthquake locations with changes in underground wastewater disposal associated with oil and gas production. The timeline was difficult to ignore. From 1974 until injection began increasing around 2012, researchers identified no magnitude 4 or larger earthquakes in the study area. Between 2012 and 2016, there were six. Many earthquakes occurred in shallow, crystalline basement rock beneath the main injection horizon. Researchers concluded that induced seismicity was the probable explanation. Changing pressure underground appeared capable of influencing faults that had already existed for millions of years. The faults weren't new. Their movement was. Topic 10. The magnitude 4.9 earthquake near Milan. On November 12, 2014, the change became impossible to ignore. A roughly magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck near Milan, Kansas. USGS researchers including George Choi, Justin Rubenstein, William Yeck, Daniel McNamara, Charles Mueller, and Oliver Boyd investigated the event. Foreshocks and aftershocks allowed researchers to better reconstruct the fault responsible. Injection records provided another part of the puzzle. It became an important case study of how human changes to underground pressure can interact with ancient geological structures. That's what makes the Kansas earthquake story so unexpected. Nothing dramatic had to appear at the surface first. The fault was already there. Researchers only discovered how responsive it could be after it started moving. We're halfway through and Kansas has already given us a disappearing aquifer, dissolving salt, temporary lakes, a fading river, buried volcanic structures, and unexpected earthquakes. If this is your kind of geography, subscribe to DiscoverTube, because the second half goes even further back in time. And answer this, which discovery so far caught you most off guard? Because the next one completely changes what Kansas used to look like. Topic 11, Kansas used to be underwater. Forget the wheat. Forget the prairie. Go back roughly 80 million years, and large parts of western Kansas were beneath the western Eastern Interior Seaway. Marine sediment accumulated on the bottom. Organisms died and were buried. Over millions of years, those deposits became the chalk formations now exposed across western Kansas. So when you're walking through parts of the state today, you're effectively standing on an ancient seabed. The ocean disappeared. The evidence didn't. Topic 12. Sea monsters are buried beneath the plains. And that ancient Kansas ocean contained predators. Big ones. Kansas rocks preserve mosasaurs, sharks, giant fish, and flying reptiles. One of the most famous fossils is Xiphactinus, a huge predatory fish. An extraordinary Kansas specimen preserves another fish inside its body. It's essentially a prehistoric feeding event frozen in stone. Mosasaurs also occupied these waters. Pteranodon flew overhead. So beneath a landscape now dominated by cattle and wheat is evidence of an ecosystem that would have looked completely alien. Modern Kansas is only the latest version of the state. Topic 13. Kansas's famous rocks are falling apart. Those ancient marine deposits still form some of Kansas's strangest scenery. Monument rocks. Castle rock. The chalk landscapes of western Kansas. But none of them are permanent. Chalk is relatively soft. Rain removes material. Wind attacks exposed surfaces. Water enters fractures. Freeze-thaw cycles can widen them. Eventually, sections collapse. That means you can compare photographs taken decades apart and actually see geological change. An 80-million-year-old formation can visibly transform within a human lifetime. Kansas isn't just hiding ancient geology. Some of it is disappearing in front of us. Topic 14. There's another aquifer even deeper underground below. Portions of Kansas lies another enormous groundwater system, the Dakota Aquifer. And it isn't simply a second version of the High Plains Aquifer. Its chemistry changes dramatically depending on location. Some sections contain usable freshwater. Others contain saline groundwater. In northwestern Kansas, the top of the Dakota can occur more than 1,000 feet underground. Groundwater can also move between different aquifer systems. So beneath one Kansas field, you can have multiple layers of water-bearing rock, each with different chemistry, pressure, and flow. Kansas may look simple horizontally. Go downward, and it becomes increasingly complicated. Topic 15. Farmers are running a giant water experiment. Here's one of the more hopeful surprises. Kansas isn't simply watching its groundwater disappear. Some communities are actively testing whether the decline can be slowed. Local Enhanced Management Areas, or LEMAs, allow groundwater users to establish pumping restrictions. Researchers can then compare water use, agricultural production, and aquifer response. Kansas geological survey modeling suggests that in many threatened areas of western Kansas, reductions of roughly 18 percent to 32 percent could stabilize groundwater levels for at least one or two decades. That doesn't refill the aquifer, but it changes the trajectory. One of America's biggest groundwater experiments is therefore happening underneath Kansas farmland. Topic 16. Most of the prairie is hidden below ground. The Flint Hills provide a different kind of surprise. Tall grass prairie looks impressive above ground. The hidden portion is arguably more important. Prairie plants build extensive root systems beneath the surface. Those roots help plants survive drought, recover from fire, stabilize soil, and store carbon. That's why prescribed fire can sweep across large sections of the Flint Hills without destroying the ecosystem. NASA satellites can observe smoke and burn scars from above. At ground level, the landscape turns black. Yet the underground system survives. New growth returns. What looks destroyed can become green again remarkably quickly. The secret is beneath the surface. Topic 17. Underground geology helped create a giant bird sanctuary. Cheyenne Bottoms is one of Kansas' most important wetlands. During migration, enormous numbers of birds use the region. But the basin itself is connected to deeper geological processes. Subsurface evaporite deposits and long-term subsidence helped create low terrain where water could collect. Think about that chain. Ancient seas leave minerals. Those minerals become buried. Geological processes alter the surface. A wetland develops. Migratory birds eventually depend on it. A landscape created partly by ancient underground geology now influences animals traveling across modern North America. Topic 18, Kansas has salty groundwater hundreds of miles from the sea. Kansas is deep inside North America yet some of its groundwater can be surprisingly salty. The source isn't the modern ocean, it's ancient geology. Groundwater moving through salt-bearing rocks dissolves minerals and transports them. Within systems such as the Dakota Aquifer, water quality can change dramatically between locations. One area can contain fresh water. Another can contain water too saline for many normal uses. The oceans that once covered Kansas may be gone from the map. Chemically, parts of them are still here. Topic 19. Kansas has moving sand. Kansas also hides landscapes that look like they belong much farther west. Southwestern Kansas contains extensive dune fields built from wind-blown sand. Many dunes are now stabilized by vegetation. Others reveal how mobile this landscape can become when conditions change. The Dust Bowl provided the extreme example. Drought weakened vegetation. Agricultural disturbance exposed soil. Powerful winds did the rest. Huge quantities of sediment entered the atmosphere. Topsoil moved across state lines, fields changed, dunes shifted. The supposedly solid Great Plains temporarily became a moving landscape. Topic 20. Kansas was never as ordinary as it looked. That's the part worth remembering. Kansas didn't suddenly become strange because we started looking underground. The strange geology was always there. USGS hydrologists such as Virginia McGuire and Kyle Juracek helped reveal enormous changes in groundwater and stream flow. Researchers including George Choi, Justin Rubenstein, William Yek, and Daniel McNamara investigated unexpected seismic activity beneath southern Kansas. Kansas Geological Survey researchers continue studying aquifers, salt deposits, subsidence, Fossils and the state's deeper geological structure. Each measurement exposes another layer. Beneath farmland is declining groundwater. Beneath central Kansas is ancient salt. Beneath quiet southern counties are faults capable of moving. Beneath western wheat fields is an ancient ocean floor. And beneath northeastern Kansas are traces of volcanic activity roughly 90 million years old. None of those things fit the stereotype, and that's exactly the point. Kansas is easy to underestimate because its biggest surprises don't announce themselves from the highway. Some require a monitoring well, others require a seismometer, a drill core, a fossil excavation, or millions of years of rock exposed by erosion. So here's our final Discover Tube question. Before this video, which of these would you have believed was hiding in Kansas? The buried volcanoes? The ancient sea monsters? The enormous salt formation? Or an aquifer whose water level has fallen more than 100 feet in some places. Tell us which one caught you off guard. And subscribe to DiscoverTube for more places across America that are nothing like they first appear. Because Kansas' biggest surprise isn't one hidden object. It's how many completely different worlds are stacked beneath a landscape that looks so simple from above.