State center will be focal point for international study of caves, karst
11/21/2008
Photo by: Photo by Kenneth Ingham
Veni's superhuman power, as executive director of the state's soon-to-be-built National Cave and Karst Research Institute, is that he can explain what karst is faster than a speed-talking geologist.
"It's a type of landscape," Veni said. "It's formed by dissolving rock, whether that be limestone, marble, dolomite, gypsum, rock salt or something else."
Water essentially melts away rock in karst topography.
Some karst landscapes in Texas, for instance, are losing elevation at a rate of about one inch per thousand years from that melting, he said.
If you watch a chunk of rock salt dissolving in water you can also get a decent idea of how karst landscapes work, he added.
"Everyone knows what caves are, but if you ask them what karst is they have no idea," Veni said. "We need to change that. One of our goals is to make karst understandable to people all over the country."
Construction on the $5.2 million, 17,315-square-foot institute will begin Monday in Carlsbad. And the facility will take about 18 months to complete, he said.
The nonprofit center was created by Congress in 1998 and is overseen by the National Park Service, the State of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech and the City of Carlsbad. Since its creation, the center has been operating mostly as a research program out of New Mexico Tech. But when the building is complete that will change, and much of the staff will move to its new home in Carlsbad, Veni said.
And despite the Karst Krusader's overwhelming geologic passion, the institute won't just focus on karst. It will also be a place for research on caves, bats and bat biology — and it will be a home for educational and public outreach on these topics, with 3,000 square feet of museum and classroom space, he said.
One of the more innovative ideas incorporated into the building's design is a built-in bat roost, wired for video, sound, temperature monitoring and other scientific investigation.
The roost will provide needed habitat for bats and also will be a resource for biologists and students from New Mexico and around the world, said Van Romero, New Mexico Tech's vice president for research and economic development.
"The bats will be monitored, and we hope to put that on the Internet," Romero said, "so classrooms from around the world can look in on the bats and check out what's going on."
New Mexico Tech is also recruiting several science teachers from across the state to develop a series of karst, bat and cave programs for grades K-12, Romero said.
The state is a great home for this type of facility, which has drawn interest from scientists all over the world, because of its diversity of caves, said Penny Boston, associate director of the national research institute and head of Tech's cave and karst program.
"We have a lot of variety here in terms of caves, and there are caves all over the state," Boston said.
Parts of the state are home to caves made of gypsum, lava, limestone, sandstone and other materials. New Mexico is also home to the Snowy River Formation, which scientists believe is the largest continuous calcite formation in the world.
"When you put everything together the variety is amazing," Boston said. "The only caves we don't have here are seaside caves and quartzite caves, although we probably had seaside caves in the distant past, when there was an ocean here."
There are also many practical reasons why the public and scientists should be interested in caves, she said.
"The subsurface is so poorly understood," Boston said. "We're just beginning to investigate. But one thing we're interested in is organisms that live there and the chemicals they make."
Algae and bacteria on cave walls make complex biological molecules to kill each other off as they compete for scarce resources, she said.
"Some of those are antibiotics that they use against each other, and as we study those more closely we could be able to find ways to use them medically for ourselves," Boston said.
Beyond that, there's also a variety of animals that live in caves, including bats and rare species of spiders and other creatures, she said.
"If you look at the variety of plants, lizards and other species in tropical areas, there's so much we don't know or understand about it, and our understanding of the biology in caves is very similar to that," Boston said.
Caves are also important from an archaeological perspective, because early humans often lived in caves and have left evidence behind that lets us better understand our past, she said.
And karst, too, plays a much wider role in the world than most people would think, Veni said.
For one thing, he noted, it makes up about 20 percent of the landscape across the United States.
"About 40 percent of the people in this country who use ground water get it from karst aquifers," Veni said. "If you care about your water supply — will it be clean, is it safe — then you need to know about karst."
The interactions between the surface and underground in karst or cave landscapes is also critical to understand, Boston said.
"People don't realize the type of wealth in these systems, or that the surface and subsurface all go together," Boston said. "People need to realize that there is an underground wilderness there that has to be preserved."
Things that happen on the surface can easily pollute the underground environment, Veni added.
"I have pulled solid waste out of karst aquifers that are people's drinking-water systems," Veni said, adding that the pollution often comes from people who don't understand how their activities on the land's surface can influence underground resources.
Beyond that, misunderstanding of karst can also lead to sinkholes and other problems that can damage property or even kill people, he said.
"Part of what we're doing is developing more ways to understand karst hazards and to find ways to predict them and perhaps even prevent them," Veni said.
Overall, Veni said he's just eager to see the facility up and running — and to see the research and educational programs that come out of it.
"Karst really should be a household word, like caves or groundwater, and I hope one of the things we do here is to educate people about how important karst is," Veni said.
Contact Sue Vorenberg at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.