Kansas Geological Survey to study interaction of agriculture, playas in western Kansas
LAWRENCE — Many playas on agricultural land, including 80% of the more than 22,000 playas in western Kansas, have been plowed and planted over. The effect that farming playas has on their ability to contribute to recharge of the critical High Plains aquifer is unknown. A new project led by the Kansas Geological Survey will study the interaction between agriculture and playas in western Kansas to improve understanding of how farming playas affects recharge rate and associated issues.
School of Architecture & Design hosting pre-college summer design camp
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design will host its annual pre-college KU Design Camp June 13-19. Designed for high school students, the KU Design Camp provides aspiring architects, artists, designers and other students looking to explore how creativity and problem-solving skills can be applied to different in-demand career paths.
NSF EPSCoR grant will advance understanding of neutrinos and support new faculty
LAWRENCE — A $1.2 million award from the National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR program will create a new faculty position at the University of Kansas within the next year, support postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, and fund work to better detect and analyze neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (IceCube) in Antarctica and a new observatory, dubbed RNO-G, in Greenland.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Tony Layzell, Kansas Geological Survey, 785-864-7767, [email protected], @ksgeology
Kansas Geological Survey to study interaction of agriculture, playas in western Kansas
LAWRENCE — Shallow depressions that hold water from rainfall and runoff to create small temporary lakes called playas dot the western Great Plains. When full, they’re transformed into mini-wetlands that are home to a variety of plants and wildlife not normally found in the region. They also serve as areas of recharge, meaning a portion of the collected water makes its way into the High Plains aquifer that underlies much of western Kansas and parts of seven other states.
But many playas on agricultural land, including 80% of the more than 22,000 playas in western Kansas, have been plowed and planted over. The effect that farming playas has on their ability to contribute to recharge of the aquifer is unknown.
A new project led by the Kansas Geological Survey in collaboration with the University of Waterloo, Kansas Biological Survey and the University of Minnesota-Mankato will study the interaction between agriculture and playas to improve understanding of how farming playas affects recharge rate and associated issues. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, through the Kansas Water Office, has awarded $270,000 in funding to support the two-year project.
“Farming often increases playa sedimentation, which reduces the volume of water a playa basin can hold as well as changing the soil structure,” said Tony Layzell, KGS assistant scientist who will oversee the project. “It’s possible these combined effects reduce recharge rates, thereby reducing the amount of water entering the High Plains aquifer.”
Understanding recharge is crucial to understanding the health of the aquifer, especially in dry western Kansas where nearly all water used for cities, industry and agriculture is pumped from the High Plains aquifer. Since the 1950s, when large amounts of water began to be drawn out of the aquifer, mostly for irrigation, some areas of western Kansas have seen significant water-level declines.
“Western Kansas receives so little rainfall that recharge can’t keep up with pumping demand,” Layzell said. “Our study will provide information as to whether conserving or restoring playas could play a role in helping to reduce aquifer water-level declines.”
Previous research by Randy Stotler, adjunct researcher and a lead scientist on the project, has shown that playas function as areas of focused recharge to the aquifer. The new study will add to researchers’ understanding of the relationship between playas and the aquifer.
The playa project is centered in Groundwater Management District 1, where water levels have declined nearly 11 feet since 1996, according to a KGS monitoring project. GMD1 includes parts of Wallace, Greeley, Wichita, Scott and Lane counties. Results will likely be applicable across western Kansas, Layzell said.
Playas selected for the study will span a range of characteristics, including farmed and not farmed, irrigated and not irrigated, varied sizes and depths to the aquifer, and different degrees of sedimentation. Researchers will analyze water chemistry and soil samples and inventory plant and animal life in and around each playa.
They also will collect cores — sections of rock and sediment obtained by drilling — from selected playas. The cores will undergo in-depth analysis of factors such as sediment depth and soil structure that will improve understanding of the interactions among the playa, agriculture and the aquifer. Chemical tracers and specialized instruments will help researchers determine how much of the water collected in a playa makes its way into the aquifer.
Together, the information gathered during the project will help researchers estimate cumulative recharge for the playas studied and model the wider effects of farming playas on aquifer recharge in GMD1 and beyond.
“The goal is to provide scientific information to landowners and resource managers so they can target limited resources for conservation and restoration efforts,” Layzell said.
The study also will examine the economic value of farmed playas compared to non-playa farmland.
“Anecdotal evidence suggests that crop yields on cultivated playas are lower compared to yields on non-playa farmland,” Layzell said. “The question is, are the costs of farming the playa greater than the potential profit for the farmers? Knowing the answer may help landowners determine whether their playa land is more valuable when left undisturbed.”
A number of federal and state agencies and private conservation organizations support the goals of the project and believe the data gathered by the project team will have wide-ranging benefits for addressing natural resource and conservation issues. The Playa Lakes Joint Venture, Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Kansas Alliance for Wetlands and Streams, Ducks Unlimited, Kansas Forest Service, GMD1, Kansas Department of Agriculture, Division of Conservation, the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have all expressed support for the project.
Project staff are working with landowners to gain access to about 15 playas in GMD1 for this study. They plan to collect core and begin field assessments this summer.
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Contact: Dan Rolf, School of Architecture & Design, 785-864-3027, [email protected], @ArcD_KU
School of Architecture & Design hosting pre-college summer design camp
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design will host its annual pre-college KU Design Camp June 13-19.
Designed for high school students entering their sophomore, junior or senior year, the KU Design Camp provides aspiring architects, artists, designers and other students looking to explore how creativity and problem-solving skills can be applied to different in-demand career paths.
Students learn new skills, develop portfolios and gain hands-on experience in college-level studio courses taught by KU architecture and design faculty members. Campers have the option to participate in one or two studios during the week.
Studio topics include animation, architecture, branding/logo design, drawing, footwear design, interior architecture, photography and zine making.
Limited scholarships are available.
See the KU Design Camp webpage for complete details and to register.
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Don’t miss new episodes of “When Experts Attack!,”
a KU News Service podcast hosted by Kansas Public Radio.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/when-experts-attack
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
NSF EPSCoR grant will advance understanding of neutrinos and support new faculty
LAWRENCE — Neutrinos are almost intangible subatomic particles that hardly interact with matter in the universe. Billions of neutrinos are shooting through your body as you read this sentence, and you don’t even notice. Explosive deep-space events like gamma-ray bursts, merging black holes, neutron stars and even the Big Bang all emitted high-energy neutrinos that shower the Earth, holding secrets to the nature and history of the cosmos.
Now, a $1.2 million award from the National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR program will create a new faculty position at the University of Kansas within the next year, support postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, and fund work to better detect and analyze neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (IceCube) in Antarctica and a new observatory, dubbed RNO-G, in Greenland.
The work at KU is part of a larger $6 million collaboration among multiple universities to develop the large-scale neutrino detection instruments and harness big data.
“We’re going to be instituting a project this summer in Greenland that will pilot a lot of the hardware we want to use for the next phase of the IceCube experiment, so-called IceCube-Gen2, at the South Pole,” said co-principal investigator David Besson, professor of physics & astronomy at KU. “I’ll be going to Greenland for six weeks over the summer as part of that effort.”
Besson said the study of neutrinos will push forward understanding of the cosmos beyond the capability of the telescope, the standard instrument of astronomy for 400 years.
“The universe isn’t entirely transparent to light, especially very high-energy electromagnetic radiation, like gamma rays,” he said. “The universe is filled with this sort of fog of faint light left over from a time close to the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background. Because that faint fog permeates the entire universe, very high-energy gamma rays produced at the edge of the universe can’t make it to our terrestrial observatories — they’re absorbed by that fog. If you wanted to trace some interesting astrophysical object, not by the gamma rays that are produced, but by the protons that it might produce, the protons will also be absorbed on that fog. So, how do you observe the far reaches of the universe at these energy levels? The only particle that’s capable of reaching us is the neutrino because it’s a very penetrating particle.”
Because neutrinos are so elusive, scientists at IceCube in Antarctica and IceCube2 in Greenland transform miles and miles of ice into huge neutrino detectors.
“Because neutrinos are so penetrating you have to have a huge target to stop a neutrino,” he said. “It very rarely interacts with matter, and that’s how it actually makes it through this fog. So, we’re using the Antarctic ice sheet as our very thick target for neutrino interactions. The ultimate goal is that you want to do all the science that you can currently do with a standard telescope. But you want to do it with a ‘neutrino telescope.’”
Besson’s work will involve improving calibration of these massive instruments to account for deformations in the ice, radio-frequency interference and other noise that make it harder to detect neutrino signals.
“We’re working to develop a technique that’s going to learn how to classify the different types of background and then specifically target those backgrounds for suppression,” Besson said. “We will develop background ‘templates’ and compare each event against that template — everything else that isn’t background will pass through as something potentially interesting. We already have examples of what this sort of noise would be like. It can be fairly mundane. The South Pole is an area where there’s not just IceCube but there are also other experiments — so there are electronics and those can produce noise. People driving on snowmobiles will produce noise. With very high wind velocities it’s possible for the wind to ionize the surface of the snow and then you get static electric effects and those will produce radio frequency.”
With massive amounts of data being collected by IceCube and IceCube-Gen2, Besson and his collaborators will work on their “ability to manage big data through advanced data science techniques in data throughput, calibration, simulation, analysis, modeling and hypothesis testing.”
“You want to be able to push the detection threshold as absolutely low as you can, and that means that you’re going to be collecting huge reams of data,” Besson said. “A lot of that data is, of course, just noise. It’s basically just junk. But you want to have algorithms capable of using sophisticated machine learning techniques that winnow and throw away the gazillions of background events and pick up the one interesting event on the fly. You want to feed that back into your data collection. So, your data collection is at the same time getting more intelligent about which events it’s writing to disk.”
The new EPSCoR grant is led by researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Other institutions from Alabama, Alaska, Delaware and Nebraska are participating in the project.
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