The Land Itself: Reading the Kansas Landscape

Kansas is not flat. The perception is understandable from the interstate, which follows the valleys, but the state has more than three thousand feet of elevation change from the Missouri border in the east to the Colorado border in the west. What Kansas is, is treeless for most of its surface area, and treelessness creates a visual illusion of flatness that the topography does not justify.

The eastern third of Kansas is rolling hills, where the Ozark plateau transitions to the plains. Streams have cut valleys into it, and the ridge-and-valley landscape has enough relief to feel like hill country. The Flint Hills run down the center of this zone, their limestone and chert foundations creating the conditions for the tallgrass that distinguishes them. Farther west, the land opens into the High Plains, which is not the same thing as the Great Plains: the High Plains is a specific geologic formation, the eroded eastern edge of the Rocky Mountain debris apron, a thick layer of sand, gravel, and clay deposited by ancient rivers flowing east from the mountains. It sits as a tableland above the surrounding terrain.

Under the High Plains runs the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground reservoir of water laid down over millions of years and recharged in wetter ages. The twentieth century discovered that you could pump it, and the discovery transformed western Kansas agriculture. Center-pivot irrigation systems, the circular green fields visible from aircraft across western Kansas, draw from the Ogallala. The aquifer is being drawn down faster than it recharges. In some parts of western Kansas, the saturated thickness has declined by more than half since intensive pumping began after World War Two. The green circles are drawing on a finite account.

To the south, the Red Hills region along the Oklahoma border is a surprise to visitors expecting endless wheat fields. Iron-rich red clay and gypsum formations create a landscape of buttes and canyons that turns rust-colored at sunset in a way that reminds you more of New Mexico than of the plains. In the northwest, the Smoky Hills provide another variation, chalk formations left by an ancient inland sea depositing limestone under what was, seventy million years ago, open water.

Kansas is not a simple place. It is a succession of geologic chapters laid out west to east, each one telling a different story about what this ground has been.