PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
Going, Going, Gone - Disappearing Streams
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Today, we each give our take on disappearing streams. When the idea was first pitched, we were thinking about 2 different things. The result - we talked about each. Join us as we continue our series on water.
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SPEAKER_00You got him. 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, Jesse. I know. He was a little startled by that.
SPEAKER_01Got him good. It's so good. Chris, you were with your parents the other night, just recently, right? I was, yes. What did Joyce have to say about Plenogeo? 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 everything you say is perfect.
SPEAKER_00No, she really didn't say a lot. She she calls you the good old doctor. So the good old doctor. The the good old Dr. Rymank, you know, that's how she always refers to it. Pretty funny. I like that. I like that. That's a pretty good one. So I'll run with that. But I will say the most impressive thing about having my mom and dad just stopped over. It was actually 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 them our new app, right? Can I say that?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. No, that's fine. We're working on it here, and uh it'll be out soon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 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, 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 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.
SPEAKER_01And so the app just went right over their head. Just who cares about the app? It's just well, how do we get their phone to the TV?
SPEAKER_00Well, no, 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 that's great.
SPEAKER_01I mean, in some ways, Chris, I always think back about this. Like as we were gone through and building this app and working on it and stuff, you know, the technology 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 the old Nokia flip phone that was like uh the walkie-talkie style thing, like whatever they were.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I hated those. I never got one of those. Oh, I had one of those Nextels, right? The Next Telegrams. Oh, yeah, that's what it was.
SPEAKER_01Nextel, direct connection.
SPEAKER_00It was like brrrr like that. Every time that went off, I got so annoyed at whoever owned that phone. I'm like, really? You want a walkie-talkie?
SPEAKER_01That's that's all that it was. It's like people walking around on FaceTime screaming at the FaceTime these days. But I had one of those things, it was bomb proof. I worked as a landscaper for many summers in high school and college, and that thing was robust. But it, you know, if you went back to that time, like whatever 2005 or 6 or something, what we would have is magic. It would really feel like magic, right? So I don't know. It it's a it's kind of amazing. I don't know. Technology is amazing. Very cool.
SPEAKER_00It is, and it is, and to be fair, it's gotta be hard to keep up. You know, I mean, uh, you always rip on me about my lack of technological skills, which I think is highly unjustified. Um it's just not not okay. Uh, Chris, hold on.
SPEAKER_01We 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.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, can I I gotta ask a question now? That is the most old man move you've pulled in a long time, though. Okay, well, this there's a backstory to this though. Like, have you ever looked at how many sent emails you have, or have you ever looked at that before? Oh, yeah, massive.
SPEAKER_01I but I want them because sometimes I have to go back years to remind myself what I sent to somebody else.
SPEAKER_00Well, Jenny got called out because at school, her school email, she had like a hundred and fifteen thousand cent emails that go way back to two thousand eight. And they're like, Yeah, there's a teacher actually on staff. They're at this big staff meeting, you know. Yeah, one of our teachers actually has 115,000 cent emails going way back to 2008. And Jenny's like, uh, is it that might be me? That might be me. And it and it was it, they were talking about her, and so that was in my head. And then I look at my like storage breakdown, you know, and I've got like, I don't know, seven gigabytes on Gmail, and I'm like, I don't need all this stuff. So I just I know it's an old man move. I own it, but you lean into it. There was a backstory to it. I did, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You lean into it, and I instantly regretted it. We we had a uh this episode, this isn't quite an old man move, but we had a bit of a well, 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?
SPEAKER_00This 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 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 it was no, I didn't like your script.
SPEAKER_01So code for we came at came at it from very different perspectives, perhaps.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I get on my phone right away because I'm that really bothers me. And so 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?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I think in this instance, I thought of this episode idea for a very specific 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, and we're looking at this river that was back in like state game land that you had to like hike back through the swamp. It's big swampy region, like cedar swamps up there. So we're 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 way is 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.
SPEAKER_00So we call that a distributary network instead of a tributary network, right? And this is a common thing that you get in like a deltaic environment or the you know, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01So carry on, go. But this was not flowing into uh uh 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 I that was distinctly different from what you initially thought about, probably for a disappearing stream.
SPEAKER_00Right, because when I go, 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 script.
SPEAKER_01It is a good idea. If we would just sat and you know uh tried to record this, we would have 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 topography, car settings. So, does that work? Is that okay if I introduce the the sort of one I was thinking of as the umbrella? Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. So disappearing streams are often categorized together sometimes with losing streams, or what we call influent streams. And uh these are streams where basically 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 stream is one where it goes completely away. In my mind, it was a subcategory.
SPEAKER_00Okay, can I just re-explain what you just said in a little bit of a different way? A lot of streams, particularly 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 at 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 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.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, 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 sort of going down in, and then the bottom of the of the V-shaped 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, 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.
SPEAKER_00That's more of the situation that was going on where you happen 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 those as disappearing streams. A disappearing stream is a subset 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 setting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I'll list these three settings. Two of them are very simple. One of them is one we're going to spend a lot of time on in disappearing streams. Okay. 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 obvious, I think. If it's super dry, the water table 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 you know, in the rainy season there's a stream there, in 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 died away is there's a slight elevation in the land, and the water table 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 flowed into the hill. It was like maybe a m a mile, maybe, but it, you know, it's okay. That's further than what I would have imagined. Okay. Yeah, you kind of had this these sort of dendritic patterns uh sort of facing each other.
SPEAKER_00Reverse dendritic, yeah. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01Reverse and then dendritic, right? Um 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.
SPEAKER_00Did the stream ever go away completely? Or was it did it just get down to like it didn't work?
SPEAKER_01No, it completely went away into like the and it it sort of decayed in these little rivulets, and then you couldn't see it for maybe half a mile or a 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, 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 underlain by easily dissolved rock types.
SPEAKER_00So do you have a lot of disappearing streams then in your area, in the way that I think about them?
SPEAKER_01There 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 the this karst settings, category number three, this is where we're gonna spend most of the time this episode. So let okay.
SPEAKER_00So just to recap, we got arid settings like desert, really, really dry areas 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 like, you know, you get sinkholes then where the limestone collapses down in on itself. And if you have a lot of those sinkholes, we call that in geology karst topography or karst settings. So those are the three.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Yep. So lead us in, Chris, to karst settings. We're back to sort of uh now we're back to sort of the the initial, the initial version there. 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?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so when I think of disappearing streams, my mind always goes to areas where you have limestone right at or near the surface. And so the black hills comes to mind. There are lots of, and you know, you and I, we love the black hills, and this is just one more reason why we love them because you get this really kind of niche setting where these rivers are doing weird things.
SPEAKER_01Let me interrupt real quick, Chris. I I need to qualify this because I don't love limestone, and I don't want to 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 karst topography is beautiful and the disparing 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 because it dissolves. What do you how do you feel about limestone?
SPEAKER_00Well, 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 the Katy Perry of of rocks. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I can never recognize that.
SPEAKER_01I forgot about that, the Katy Perry of Rocks. Chris, see above Chris's old man's data. He can't identify Katy Perry or Lime's.
SPEAKER_00I cannot. I come on, I'm not the only one out there that has a hard time. Katy 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, you know, I'm like, who's that on the TV? She's like, it's Katy Perry, Chris. And then, you know, she'll be back on five minutes later and she looks completely different. I'm like, who's that? Then it's on.
SPEAKER_01It's just uh watching like a Super Bowl halftime show with you must be so entertaining.
SPEAKER_00Just Jesse, just spending time with me is entertaining. And you know that. That is true.
SPEAKER_01That is very true.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Okay, so we love 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 deal? I don't know. I just I don't find it interesting.
SPEAKER_01I just don't find it interesting. There are certain categories of limestone that are really beautiful and quite cool, and it's obviously super important from like a process level, but 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 sounds tedious. I would rather map almost any other rock than limestone.
SPEAKER_00Can I give you some redeeming qualities of limestone? Sure. 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 stone.
SPEAKER_01That's true.
SPEAKER_00And so I like that. It's also what leads to caves, and I like those too, and you get beautiful features inside of them. So limestone can be a cool rock, it has redeeming qualities.
SPEAKER_01Okay, 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 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 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.
SPEAKER_00Very good point. And I just want to say that something that I do in my geology class 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. Oh no, just let it go. That's a good one. And then it just goes away. The Mountain Dew is acidic enough to make short work of that limestone. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, 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.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. So rainwater, natural pure water, has a neutral pH. It's not acidic, it's not basic, it's just seven pH. But there's carbon dioxide in the air, and when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms a very weak acid called carbonic acid. And then as it hits the ground and seeps into the soil, there's more carbon dioxide in the soil, and it gets a little bit more acidic. And so when you take vast volumes 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 limestone.
SPEAKER_01Okay, gotcha. That's a great description. Yep, great description. So over time, and especially in areas where like you have more acidic rain, you know, northeast of the United States has this historic legacy of mining and and machineries and and uh CO2, lots of CO2 in the atmosphere. Uh a bit more acidic rainwater will 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 sinkholes, 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 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 because 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 and north and south, and we're sitting in this valley that's mostly carbonate. And it's a valley because the carbonate, it's rainy, lots of groundwater, the stuff is dissolving quite quickly. 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 everybody 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 suddenly on campus.
SPEAKER_00Do 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 that just washes away sediment and the the sand around it and so on?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think this is almost always these are bedrock. Bedrock is not very deep in the area. Because 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 Garf. And this happens fairly frequently in the in the Happy Valley area where sinkholes are kind of appearing.
SPEAKER_00Okay. 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. 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 it? Yeah. Okay. Dolostone and limestone. And those are really similar. Okay. Dolostone is it's a common sedimentary rock, and it's a little bit harder to dissolve than limestone because it has magnesium, calcium carbonate in it, and the magnesium makes it less reactive and so on. So it is a soluble rock nonetheless. So dolestone, limestone, and then you have two others that are fairly common. I think most people have heard of them: gypsum and rock salt.
SPEAKER_01Okay. The dolostone and limestone are the big dogs here. They are 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 carbonate than you know there is halite that forms salt or rock salt and gypsum. Those things form in in more niche geologic environments, whereas limestone and dolostone form huge masses. They're currently forming in the ocean basins right now. So they're very uh readily deposited in a lot of geological environments that are very prevalent on Earth.
SPEAKER_00And of the two dolostone 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 dolostone is. That's more reactive. One, it's super, super common, and two, it's highly dissolvable in acidic groundwater, which we already talked about.
SPEAKER_01So that Chris really nicely brings us to I think the obvious conclusion here of like how a disappearing stream forms is if you have an area where streams are flowing through and then sinkholes are forming, and sinkholes can be connections to underground cave systems, basically, you can see or just networks where the water can, you know, kind of trickle and spread out right through this limestone. So you could see how a sinkhole could form near a stream and kind of captured 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 underground 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.
SPEAKER_00It can be really dramatic. And, you know, I talked to you about my feelings toward the Black Hills, and you get disappearing streams there because there's limestone exposed at the surface, and and you 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 in near Lander, Wyoming.
SPEAKER_01So where where was that again? Where is I I have this in my head because this was the first time I'd ever heard of a disappearing stream when my dad ran this geology trip that the Summer Sides 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? Yes, 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 can't remember.
SPEAKER_00It'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. It's called the Papozia River. It's one of the most mispronounced rivers. You would just annihilate the name of this if you just looked at the Popo because you really bet. Yeah, that's right. Because it's spelled P-O-P-O and then space and then A-G-I-E. So it's but it's pronounced Papozia. It's a Native American thing. Anyway, this river is just slicing through this Madison limestone. It's very big, it's very fast, it's a powerful river, lots of white water and so on. And then it just dumps into this sinkhole. And so the river disappears. It's really dramatic.
SPEAKER_01Really dramatic.
SPEAKER_00You 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? Because 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 where water then just, you know, kind of seeps out kind of in this distributary 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 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. Yeah. And then also, how would you test this?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you would think it's fairly quick, but I think this is this brings up a really good point about how disappearing streams can totally change the river system, like how much sediment a river is carrying. So, what is it for for uh Sinks Canyon?
SPEAKER_00It takes about two hours for it to come back up through the rise. It only goes a quarter mile.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Now, 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's 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 into the sink and waited for the dye to show back up in the rise.
SPEAKER_01Oh man. I mean, and you can see like you described earlier, how it's just raging beforehand and then it goes down into the groundwater and then it comes back up, and it's 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 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.
SPEAKER_00To 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 time this is going to lead to the enlargement of openings and then future caves. This is an ongoing process, then, between the sink and the rise, right?
SPEAKER_01Does that make sense? 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 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.
SPEAKER_00And another example of this in the Black Hills, which is much less dramatic than Sinks Canyon, these rivers 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 Lost River.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_00Ridiculous amount, right?
SPEAKER_01If you just type in Lost River, I did this exercise because 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.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Now, hey, we got some flack because we need to talk more about stuff outside of the U.S. So can we give our friends on the other side of the pond another example, Jesse, of a of a lost river or disappearing stream? We can try.
SPEAKER_01I forgive me, uh, these you know, our English listeners, this pronunciation might not be great. River Lathkil, Lathkill, Lathkill, something in Derbyshire, 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 has a disappearing 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 cars topography, this can happen, and usually it will happen.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Well, hey, what do you think, Jesse? Have we done justice to disappearing, losing?
SPEAKER_01You know what, and we managed to get on the same page, I think, too, even though we came at it from pretty disparate places.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh, disparate. Disparate. That's a very interesting pronunciation on that. Is that you is that right? Disparate? Disparate.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think disparate. Disparate, uh, different places coming at it from different angles.
SPEAKER_00Oh my gosh. You are a funny guy, you know that. Yeah, I try to be. Hey, do you say the word whilst?
SPEAKER_01No, I don't say whilst or whilst.
SPEAKER_00You just strike me as a person that would say wilst. Yeah, I might.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, I'll get my bust that out every now and then. Only when I'm wearing my sport coat with the leather patches on the elbows, then I will.
SPEAKER_00Jesse, so you strike me as the 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 gonna do.
SPEAKER_01I uh I I don't have one actually, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00If I get you one, will you wear it?
SPEAKER_01Well, 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 Can you go get it? They have ear flaps that 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.
SPEAKER_00Stormy chromer. So I wonder if the hat is called a chromer.
SPEAKER_01I 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.
SPEAKER_00Do you have it here at your house right now? Do you have your hat?
SPEAKER_01I'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 for you.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I'm gonna hold you to that. I want to record a whole session with you wearing your hat.
SPEAKER_01I'll put my sport jacket with the leather patches on. I'll maybe get a pipe. Do you have one of those too? Oh yeah, oh yeah, we gotta have those when you've got to when you gotta be pretentious.
SPEAKER_00That is so good. I can't wait. I cannot wait.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, all right. It'll be great. The wool tie, maybe too. Yeah, very, very classic. 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, planetgeocast at gmail.com or go to our website, Planet Geocast. There you can donate, you can subscribe, and you can see all of our past episodes. Cheers. Peace.