Bowling Green, Ky. - A research effort led by Western Kentucky University geoscientists may improve the water quality and enhance the tourism industry in China's Hunan Province.

A group from WKU's Hoffman Environmental Research Institute is studying the karst area that contains Wanhuayan, or Ten Thousand Flowers Cave. Pat Kambesis, assistant director of the Hoffman Institute, led a seven-member team on a two-week project at the region last month.

The team, which included geoscience graduate students Andrea Croskrey, Ben Tobin and Johanna Kovarik, explored and mapped several cave passages and conducted fluorescent dye tracing studies to gain more information on the routes of the area's underground river systems.

"Our work at Wanhuayan Cave and area has provided information about the hydrogeology of the area," Kambesis said. "This is significant since the area is agricultural in terms of land use. Understanding the source and flow paths of groundwater is important in terms of protecting drinking water resources which are impacted by the agricultural land use.

"The team's work has revealed that agricultural land use has changed the natural hydrologic patterns in the watershed and that farming practices have diverted and changed natural water courses," she said.

The cave system also is an important tourist attraction for the Hunan Province. Like other parts of southwestern China's rural karst regions, the area is relatively poor, and the ability to attract additional tourists to the area offers a potential resource for sustainable economic development. About eight million people in the southwest China karst region live below China's poverty level, which is defined as an income of 625 Chinese yuan, equivalent to about $75 per year.

"A better understanding of the extent of the Wanhuayan Cave System confirms its status as a world-class show cave, which is important to tourism in the area," Kambesis said.

"Several aspects of the project are especially exciting," said Dr. Chris Groves, director of the Hoffman Institute within WKU's Applied Research and Technology Program.

"Such projects offer our students the opportunity to study and make new discoveries within unexplored Chinese cave systems, while simultaneously providing a real public service to the local government, which may be able to increase sustainable economic development through enhancement of the area's tourism infrastructure," said Groves, who traveled to China in December to visit the area's caves and plan the expedition with Chinese officials and scientists.

Groves added that the fact that he could send a team of WKU graduate students to safely lead and carry out the expedition without direct supervision is yet another indication of the extremely high level of students that WKU's karst programs are able to attract.

Kambesis, who led the expedition, is an internationally known cave explorer, surveyor and author, and has participated in and led cave expeditions throughout the world for many years before coming to WKU as a graduate student in geosciences.

At the request of China's Institute of Karst Geology and the Wanhuayan Cave management group, the WKU team produced a detailed map of the cave's main passage and photographed significant areas of the cave.

During the expedition, team members climbed a 50-foot waterfall that contributes 70 percent of the water flow to the cave in a side passage in Wanhuayan Cave and found a new upper level passage. The team also visited nearby Songjia Cave and Zhenyan Cave to conduct dye tracing and found that streams in those caves flowed into Wanhuayan.

"One of the things we learned from our dye trace work is that the Wanhuayan watershed, and thus probably the cave system, is much more extensive than previously known," Kambesis said. "In addition to dye tracing we did some geologic reconnaissance in the area. Some of the smaller caves that we visited showed evidence of hydrothermal activity. We know that upstream end of the watershed is defined by a granite intrusion so we believe that this has influenced cave development in the area.

"Though the cave is documented as being formed in limestone, we think the limestone may actually be a low grade marble rather than limestone. We are in the process of analyzing rock samples back at WKU to confirm this."

The WKU group will continue its water quality study to determine how agriculture and human development has affected water quality, its hydrologic study on the Wanhuayan drainage basin and its mapping of the Wanhuayan system.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you'd like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For information, contact Chris Groves at (270) 745-5974.