Karst topography

Karst topography occurs when a landscape is marked by underground drainage patterns. In such regions there may be little or no surface drainage. The word Karst, or Classical Karst, is the English name for Kras, a Slovenian region that rests on a limestone plateau.

Source of the river Loue showing karst formations

Karst landforms are generally the result of mildly acidic rainfall acting on soluble limestone or dolostone bedrock. The process of subsurface rock dissolution results in a topography with distinctive features, including sinkholes or dolines (closed basins), vertical shafts, disappearing streams, and springs. After sufficient time, complex underground drainage systems (such as karst aquifers) and extensive caves and cavern systems may form.

The carbonic acid which causes these features is formed as rain passes through the atmosphere picking up CO₂, which dissolves in the water. Once the rain reaches the ground, it passess through the soil, gathering up more CO₂ to form a weak carbonic acid solution: H₂O + CO₂ → H₂CO₃.

This mildly acidic water naturally seeps through and begins to dissolve any fractures and bedding planes in the limestone bedrock. Over time these fractures enlarge as the bedrock continues to dissolve. Openings in the rock increase in size, and an underground drainage system begins to develop, allowing more water to pass through and accelerating the formation of karst features.

Karst topography poses some difficuties for human inhabitants. Sinkholes can develop gradually as surface openings enlarge, but quite often progressive erosion is unseen, and the roof of an underground cavern suddenly collapses. Such events have swallowed homes, cattle, cars, and farm machinery.

Farming in karst areas must take into account the excessive drainage. The soils may be fertile enough, and rainfall may be adequate, but rainwater quickly moves through the crevices into the ground, sometimes leaving the surface soil parched between rains.

Water supplies from wells in karst topography are inherently hazardous, as the well water may simply run from a sinkhole in a cattle pasture through a cave and to the well, without the normal filtering that occurs in a porous aquifer. Groundwater in karst areas is just as easily polluted as surface streams. All too often, sinkholes have been used as farmstead or even community trash dumps. In karst areas where septic tanks are the main sewage disposal system, overloaded or malfunctioning systems dump raw sewage directly into underground open groundwater channels.

Pseudokarst occurs where the primary erosive agent is not rainwater, but there is underground drainage. This can occur in basalt where drainage is through lava caves, or amongst granite tors (for example Labertouche Cave in Victoria, Australia).

Karst topography

See also