THE UNDERGROUND WORLD OF JOHN BUCHANAN

Dr. John Buchanan in the Indian Creek karst, Belize, Central America.

Back in Pennsylvania when he was just 13 years old, John Buchanan never dreamed he would one day set foot inside a 2,000-year old Mayan burial chamber deep within a massive cave system in the country of Belize. At that early age, crawling under the ground was merely a fascination - a source for fun - and he wasn't at all sure what he wanted to do with his professional life. But that was also the year his eighth grade earth science teacher would become a major influence on him and change the direction of his life.

"He was a bonafide geologist as well as an educator," Buchanan recalls. "He was willing to help students outside the class if they had the interest and I did. He loaned books to me, took me on expeditions to gather fossils û that sort of thing. I guess I was in the ninth grade when I actually mapped my first cave. And, of course, I jumped right into a geology major and continued my cave exploring at the same time."

Hunting Hidden Aquifers

Now a professor of geology at Eastern, Buchanan is a highly regarded expert in sedimentology - the study of sedimentary materials on the earth's surface and how water affects them. Teaching both senior and graduate-level courses in hydrogeology and sedimentology, he also is widely in demand by city and county governments and by the Washington state Department of Ecology (DOE) for his expertise in locating and mapping underground aquifers. "Most of the consumptive water in Eastern Washington - probably more than 90 percent," says Buchanan, "comes from below the ground. So, clearly, the cities and counties in our region need to understand the extent of these systems in order to supply our current needs and to accommodate any anticipated growth."

Of the 8 -10 regional aquifer projects for which Buchanan serves as a consultant, the most complex is his work with the Spokane Aquifer, which serves the needs of a half million people. Buchanan's principle task has been to create a series of mathematical models via computer which visualize the hidden resources of water available to the county. Once the aquifer can be "seen," then Buchanan can construct a series of "what if" scenarios to determine both the availability of and anticipated demand for that water.

"It's generally a question of amount that drives the project," says Buchanan. "'How much is there?' and 'how much will we need? are the basic questions I deal with." Buchanan's work with Spokane County has progressed from large-scale modeling of the aquifer as a whole, down to the identification of individual wellhead protection areas. Each municipal or community well within the county, of which there are about 150, has what is referred to as a capture zone, Buchanan explains that while most people probably think of the aquifer as a big underground bathtub with hundreds of hoses or wells tapping its water, that image needs to be modified to account for the flow of water within that system.

"It's not a perfect analogy," he says, "but the Spokane Aquifer can be loosely compared to a river, in that the water is always moving and the level rises and falls. This means that certain parts of the aquifer naturally travel towards specific wellhead areas. That's how we define capture zones."

Buchanan has created similar mathematical models for the Chamokane Valley and the Little Spokane River aquifers. He also has done hydrogeologic consulting for the West Plains cities of Cheney, Medical Lake and Airway Heights, where basalt formations cause underground water to behave in a radically different way than Spokane's aquifer. The chief trait shared by all West Plains aquifers is their apparent continued depletion. "All of these communities have drilled new wells within the past few years," he notes. "And as population increases, water levels lower and the drought continues, we may eventually see aquifer depletion problems."

Working with Ray Soltero, EWU professor of biology and dean of the College of Science, Mathematics and Technology, Buchanan also has been involved in DOE-funded studies to measure the trophic status (relative health from a chemical/biological standpoint) of Deer Lake, Long Lake and West Medical Lake. He also has worked with the Spokane Tribe in collaboration with Allan Scholz, a professor of biology at Eastern. In this case, Buchanan's computer models have not only measured available water, but considered the effects that increased levels of farm irrigation may have on native fish. "Irrigation is an issue all over the western United States," he says. "Will there be enough water left to continue this type of farming indefinitely, or will we eventually have to return to dry land farming?"

Water quality issues are also within Buchanan's venue. "You can't read the paper these days without seeing something about the effects of landfills or sewers on the aquifer. The potential for water contamination is an issue we'll have to deal with for the foreseeable future. "Buchanan says if he can get any major concept across to his students and the local governments who make decisions regarding water usage, it would be that water - like gas and oil and minerals - can also be a non-renewable resource. "Ask most people where their water comes from and they'll point to a water tower," he says. "But it's really more like mining for gold or silver. You keep taking minerals out of the ground until one day they're gone. And, to a large degree, the same thing can happen to an aquifer."

Mapping the Unknown

When Buchanan is not teaching, conducting research or providing consultation services, he spends most of his free time pursuing his professional avocation - cave exploration and mapping - which takes him all over the western hemisphere. The plain fact is that more people probably associate his name with his caving activities than with the other important work he does. Buchanan grins at this suggestion, but agrees.

"Cave research is the highest profile work I do ... the sexiest, you might say. But it actually accounts for only about 20% of my total research activities." Perhaps the most exotic locale in which he has pursued such underground excursions is the dense jungle terrain of Belize, Central America. Deep in the middle of barely-explored wilderness lies the cave system dubbed 'Petroglyph' for the Mayan carvings found on its walls. Though the cave was rediscovered by modern explorers more than 20 years ago, it still has not been fully explored. "That's one of the things that's so fascinating about caves," Buchanan says. "Even when a cave system has been known about for some time, there are always new discoveries to be made."

Perhaps even more exciting to Buchanan is the fact that some 95 percent of the surrounding karst, or porous limestone region, is completely unexplored. It seems likely to him and other explorers that additional cave openings will be found in the region, where Petroglyph Cave has already been determined to be the second largest system in Central America.

"In the academic world, I always get kidded about having too much fun with my scientific research," says Buchanan, "but I have to admit there is a lot of 'Indiana Jones' style adventure involved. To get where we're going in Belize, for example, we have to hack through the jungle, we routinely encounter poisonous snakes and parasites ... and that's before we've even gotten inside the cave! Once inside, we've run into strange Mayan carvings and pots, human remains encased in flowstone ... you name it."

Aside from these visually rewarding aspects of caving, it also is a uniquely challenging physical test. Those who go on an expedition must be in excellect condition and must possess a specific mix of outdoor skills to participate safely. To reach a cave, Buchanan and his fellow scientists may hike for miles. Once inside, they may find themselves squeezing through minuscule passageways one minute and descending sheer rock faces the next. They may even need to be prepared for rafting an underground river.

"More than anything," says Buchanan, "I think it's the notion of being the first human to see something that appeals to me most. When you explore a cave, what you're really doing is pushing new frontiers. You can round one corner and find a Mayan pot, make another turn and run into a collection of human remains, or squeeze through a narrow passage into a huge chamber full of limestone decorations."

On other occasions, Buchanan has run into things he would rather not - such as the extremely high levels of radon he encountered not once but twice while exploring a karst area in Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains during the summer of 1988. His first exposure was in a virgin cave he discovered and named La Escondida, Spanish for The Hidden One. Radon levels in that cave were 280 picocuries per liter, which is 70 times the level considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. But that pales in comparison to the levels of more than one million picocuries he encountered in an abandoned uranium mine in the same region. That reading is believed to be the highest ever measured in the natural environment. Had he known of the intense levels, he would have worn a repirator and an oxygen mask.

"Chemical detectors don't register readings immediately, the way a Geiger counter does," he explains. "I had to send it to a testing lab and didn't know the results for a week." At Airchek, a national radon testing lab, readings were so extreme that the detector caused a complete shutdown of the facility. It took three days of intense work to reactivate it. The mine entrance has now been sealed so that no one else will accidentally receive the same exposure.

Scaling Underground Mountains

Buchanan has explored virtually every major cave system in the United States, from 1,600-foot deep Lechuguilla in New Mexico - now considered the deepest system in North America - to Jewel Cave in South Dakota, one of the longest caves with more than 100 miles of passageways.

"The numbers are sometimes staggering," says Buchanan. "In Lech, for example, it's so deep that we used more than 6,000 feet of rope. In those kinds of caves, what we're really doing is mountain climbing in reverse. Instead of scaling a peak, you're always going down, down, down, often without a bottom in sight." The up and down, fractured nature of most caves in the western United States has a lot to do with the topography and geologic complexity of the landscape, Buchanan says. In the east, caves tend to be more elongated, with a flatline profile, whereas cross-section maps of most western cave systems feature stairstep profiles that sometimes resemble a seismogram during a major earthquake.

One such system close to our own Inland Northwest region is known as Papoose Cave, and is found in what might at first seem an unlikely spot - the rugged Salmon River area [(censors at work) in northern Idaho (end censorship)]. Along with adjunct professor Tom Miller, also with Eastern's Geology Department, Buchanan has spent nearly every other weekend for the past several months exploring and mapping this cave. Not only is it a challenging vertical system, but is unusually damp inside and also extremely cool - temperatures in the mid-30s are typical. Buchanan and Miller's continual exploration of every rock wall and each tiny crevice, is now revealing Papoose to be the largest system in the Pacific Northwest. "Moving forward a little at a time," says Buchanan, "our group of twelve has pushed through somewhere between two and three thousand feet of new passageway in the past two years. I also think the potential for other significant findings around the Riggins area is quite good."

This statement is doubly impressive because the Pacific Northwest is an area with few limestone deposits and not a great many cave systems. "There are impressive systems over the border into Canada, but as for the American northwest, we're probably better known for other cave types, such as lava tubes," says Buchanan. "In fact, outside of Hawaii, Washington state holds the record - Ape Cave near Mt. St. Helens is more than two miles long." Recently, a small team of photojournalists accompanied Buchanan and Miller into a portion of Papoose Cave to record footage for an upcoming television special about their findings. Unaccustomed to being trailed through the passages and over the drop-offs, Buchanan says the lights and cameras were a strange experience in what is normally a dark and silent world.

"We're hoping this sort of exposure might change some people's image of what cave exploration is all about," he says. "Instead of thinking of caves only as dark, wet, sewer-like passageways, I'm hoping they'll see how caves can be a library of information about the earth we live on."

Just as the passages in both Petroglyph and Papoose Cave are slowly being revealed through continuous knee-scraping, knuckle-busting efforts, so has Buchanan's reputation steadily expanded over the decade he has been at Eastern. Not only is he one of very few geologists to specialize in the computerized modeling of sedimentary deposits and underground aquifer systems, but he is part of an even smaller group of scientists who actively explore and map cave systems on such an on-going basis.

"I'm fairly certain that Tom (Miller) and I are the only geologists in the Pacific Northwest doing what we're doing," he says. "Fact is, I don't think there's more than a handful nationwide who have as aggressive an interest in the subject." But that just convinces Buchanan more that his is an area ripe for continuing discovery and ideal for geology graduates who possess that extra ounce of imagination, curiosity and thirst for the unknown.

"Every geologist has his or her own area of personal interest," he acknowledges, "but to me, I can't think of anything else in my field that could be quite so physically challenging, aesthetically pleasing and intellectually rewarding."