Why Nebraska's Sandhills Aren't What You Think

In 1904, Congress passed the Kinkaid Act and handed out 640 acres of western Nebraska per homesteader, four times the normal allotment, because nobody in Washington believed the land was worth farming. They were right that it was, and wrong about what that meant. The Sandhills are a dune field of roughly 20,000 square miles, held in place by a layer of prairie sod about six inches thick. Because the surface is sand rather than soil, almost nothing that falls here runs off. Rain and snowmelt sink straight down into the water table instead of flowing away into rivers, which is why recharge in the Sandhills is commonly measured in inches per year while the southern end of the same Ogallala Aquifer measures it in fractions of one. It is also why the water table rises high enough to break the surface in the low ground between dunes, putting somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 permanent lakes on top of what is technically a desert. The grass holds the sand still, the still sand lets the water down, and the whole mechanism depends on sod that was never broken. From a 400 foot dune with waves breaking at the bottom of it, to an endangered flower that grows only in bare moving sand, this is a countdown of 30 facts about the Sandhills' geology, hydrology and ranching country that almost nobody knows. We start at #30 and count down to the single most extraordinary fact about this system, covering a waterfall pouring straight out of a canyon wall with no stream above it, alkali lakes mined for potash during the First World War, a county larger than Connecticut with one person per square mile, 20,000 acres of hand planted forest in the middle of a grassland, and the reason an oil pipeline route had to be moved off the dunes entirely. 🔔 Subscribe for more North American geography like this. 💬 Comment the town where Highway 2 took you, one word is enough. ✨ 𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 ✨ 🍁 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 🍁 Geography Docs goes landform by landform across North America, finding the single physical mechanism behind each one and following it all the way down. Rivers that run the wrong way, ice that stopped in the wrong place, water that arrives from somewhere it shouldn't. No speculation, no mysteries, just the cause and what it did to the ground. If you have ever looked at a map of this continent and felt like something wasn't adding up, you were right. Subscribe and find out what. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠: Nebraska's Sandhills Get Stranger the Deeper You Look #sandhills #nebraska #ogallala #geography #greatplains