Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Underground Rivers
PROLOG
Learning of my topic, underground rivers, my sister recalled that long ago I’d taught her to draw
underground worlds in ant-farm perspective. I’d forgotten my artistry, but once reminded, my
subterranean creationism came to memory -- tunnels and caves in which the likes of Happy,
Grumpy, Dopey, Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy and Bashful might chorus, “Hi ho, hi ho. It’s off to work we
go,” as they march to the diamond mine. The enterprise of course needed a few waterways?
And there’d be forts and secret hideouts. Unencumbered minds are knowledgeable of such.
Grade schoolers know of the hydrologic cycle, a wheel of evaporation, clouds, rainfall and rivers
back to the sea. Advanced textbooks add infiltration, a groundwater reserve, seepage to springs
and a route passing soil water to vegetation which transpires vapor back to the atmosphere, often
citing Leonardo da Vinci as the discoverer of it all. He wasn't, but indeed he was on the right
track if we limit our look to a favorable few of his backwards-scribed thoughts.
Unencumbered by criteria of scientific rigor, Leonardo simply recorded his ponderings, what he
believed he saw. And as with most of us, such insight may wander. While he envisioned a
hydrologic cycle as we now know it, he likewise conceived of a subterranean cycle spinning in
reverse, one in which water flows from sea to mountain. A divergent mind is free to venture.
I, on the other hand, was an engineering academic employing physical principals (just three will
usually do, thank you) to compute such fluid behaviors as streamline direction. Water is
obligingly law abiding, predictable even in its turbulence. One advances in the direction one
expects to travel. There should be but a single streamline in a journal article.
Leonardo and I would thus have had little in common, other than that he might have appreciated
my childhood art, and I, his sketches of cascading waters.
Perhaps through erroneous cataloging did The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God, A
Theme in Geoteleology (1979) by Yi-Fu Tuan end up in the University of New Mexico Centennial
Science and Engineering Library. Curiosity led me to pull the slight volume from the shelf where
it languished -- long languished, according to the due-date stamps -- amidst weighty references
on such topics as vadose flow and my interest at the time, kinematic waves.
"Geo," engineers know, pertains to the earth, but "teleology" wasn't in my vocabulary. It's the
philosophical study of design and purpose. Tuan's book dealt with how 17th-century Christianity
came to presume hydrologic vindication in the works of Newton. Not a reference on kinematic
waves, for sure, but I was enchanted by the period woodcuts.
Tuan's work -- not a quick read for one like me -- revealed to me that the subject of hydrology -- a
field in which I'd thought myself reasonably versed -- engendered streamlines in a myriad of
directions, streamlines through a world in which like Leonardo's, ideas run freer.
I thus return to my juvenile sketches of underground wonders. It's not the Seven Dwarfs' gold I
pursue, but the subterranean streams that they encounter, rivers in which streamlines diverge.
Regarding the seven dwarfs, not until much later would I
discover that Disney's Snow White (1937) actually
contains an underground river. See Chapter 23, Girls,
Too! I shouldn't have been surprised, as such rivers are
indeed everywhere.
Richard Heggen
Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering
University of New Mexico
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
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