The tools are not fancy: a rock hammer, shovel, four-wheel drive vehicle, spade and auger.

During the summer months, Terri Woodburn and Bill Johnson pound, dig and scratch into the Kansas soil to gather data to develop geological maps. But now, the dust and warm summer sun are distant memories, replaced with the winter tools of technology. The work for the map makers begins as the data are entered into the computer for development of the digital map.

The goal, as mandated by the state, is to map every Kansas county. The maps allow people to evaluate geologic hazards, plan transportation and utility routes, select sites for buildings and protect ground water and natural resources. Each map will take two to five years to complete in the field and in the lab.

Last month, Woodburn and Johnson completed the Ford County geological map, the 37th digital map created by the Kansas Geological Survey since 1988.

The maps, which serve as a starting point for many construction and engineering projects, can be created in large paper form or digital files that are sent on to engineers and planners.

Along with finishing the two-year Ford County project, the Kansas Geological Survey recently received $221,100 in grants from STATEMAP, a national geological corporative mapping program. The respective funds were the largest ever for Kansas.

During the last several summers, Johnson and Woodburn, with the help of students, have surveyed areas of western Kansas to create county maps; Johnson has worked on 18 different maps during the past 30 years.

“Fieldwork is definitely for me,” said Johnson, a geologist and professor of geography. “It gets you out of the office. I really like being out on the High Plains. You see storms coming from way off. The sounds are all different — the smells, the grit in the air. It’s just a different environment out there.”

More funding this year, totalling $22,472, allowed for additional drilling technology. Geologists can now more accurately categorize the ground, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of the mapping process, said Greg Ludvigson, associate scientist at KGS.

Copies of the old maps dating as far back as 1925 stand coiled together in bins, which will soon be replaced by digital files.

Currently 102 of the 105 Kansas counties have some form of a published geological map, but only one-third of those are digital, said John Dunham, manager of cartographic services. Digital maps can be changed unlike the maps of old. In the past, once a line was drawn, it stayed, but now map makers can change lines as needed.

A new kind of mapping

Additional technology in the field has helped the geologists draw soil types more accurately. Instead of walking the terrain and marking observations, geologists increasingly work with aerial photos and digital imagery to give them an overview of the area, Dunham said.

After Johnson and Woodburn, hand draw the lines, the map goes to the lab for digitizing.

After field work and lab analysis have been completed, the geologists team up with three map makers in the KGS on West Campus.

“That is the part of the process that is the most time consuming and definitely the most hated,” Dunham said.

The map makers spend up to eight hours making thousands of data points on the computer for each of the 9-to-12 elevation sheets that make up a county.

Counties in the Flint Hills are some of the most time consuming because of the higher elevations. These maps can take up to four hours a sheet. And with at least nine sheets, that is 36 hours of making dots for one county alone.

Next comes filling the various layer types with specified colors, draping over terrain, placing the elevation and adding man-made elements like roads.

Price said he enjoyed the more human aspect of the geological maps such as adding little highway shields that resemble actual road signs.

“I’ve always had a bit of obsession with them because it is impossible to find a good set of them from Missouri,” Price said. “Therefore, when John showed me how to do it, my mind was completely blown.”

Ground-level mapping

In addition to the technical side of map making, Dunham’s crew enjoys interacting with the physical landscape.

The geologists must deal with residents because they have to get permission to survey the land. In Johnson’s 30 years of geologic mapping, only one person has ever mistreated him, he said.

“We really do get to see the interaction between culture and geology, and these historic aspects make it even more interesting for me,” Woodburn said.

Tracks from the Santa Fe Trail in Ford County and ruins of homes from the 1930s Dust Bowl in Morton County are some of the historic cultural remains mappers still come across today.

Because the process is so time consuming, Johnson said no completion date for mapping all the counties has been set. In 2009, the KGS completed two county maps. At that pace, the project could take another few decades, but the researchers would not speculate.

A geologic map of Douglas County was completed in 1992 and later revised in 1999.

Woodburn and Johnson have been working on maps of western Kansas that are designated by the State Advisory Board. Counties are chosen because of environmental priorities such as coal mines in eastern Kansas and water around urban areas like Hutchinson.

Johnson and Woodburn said they looked forward to their next tasks, finishing Reno and starting Jefferson and Haskell counties. The students at the mapping lab currently have 12 to 15 maps underway.

“If you look at the distribution map, we have just gotten started,” he said.

— Edited by Becky Howlett