Ari Anisfeld's Reports

As we began our descent into Walvis Bay Airport, I looked out to gauge the time until landing. I kept looking, but the landscape, a light hillock-covered desert, seemed ever close, and there was no sight of Walvis, Namibia's second most populated city. Finally, a mother in the row behind me pointed out the airport's scant chain-link fence, and we soon landed. As we drove away from the Bay, we had to stop to watch a train near Dune 7-it was stuck and six railway workers hurriedly tried to clean off the tracks with brooms. We stopped again on the way home around half past six; a small cohort of springbok grazed ahead of us, and in the other direction the sunset over the vast gravel plain, which was unusually populated with golden grasses. These were my first impressions of Namibia. While I generally enjoy my job and Gobabeb society, my thoughts of my first two months here are dominated by the desert. In later reports, I will discuss the pleasures and pains of my duties and isolated living, but for the moment, I will share only stories of sand.

Gobabeb sits at the cusp of three sandy desert ecosystems; viewed from the sky (or Google Earth) there is a clear squiggly line that separates two distinctly colored and textured landmasses. To the south is the dune sand sea. Red-orange sand comes from the South African Karoo propelled by the Orange River and Antarctic Banguela Current and forms large heaps of sand, which are shaped into dunes by wind. While the dunes march north, large semiannual floods prevent their encroachment at the Kuiseb River. The riverbed and parts of its flood plain form a linear oasis of riparian forest where Acacias and other plant life create a stunning green break in the landscape. North of the green, the gravel plain lays flat and wide; its horizon marked by far-off solitary inselbergs, 'island mountains' in English. In each location one finds sand.

Sand!

Sand is beautiful. On a supply trip in late July, there was a strong east wind. As we neared Walvis, dune sand started crawling across the road ahead of us. Soon these low wisps of red were sprinkling our tires and creeping up over the roof. We drove slowly on through the cloud. Similarly, I like the way dunes respond to the plodding force of my steps. When I walk on dune crests, sheets of sand are pushed down forming miniscule avalanches. Sometimes the sand shatters as it falls and creates a stunning scaly texture. When walking up a dune's more malleable slip face in the late afternoon, the sand quakes and moves out in ripples.

Sand is more than aesthetics. Sand can be crafted into houses. There is a group of British architects that Gobabeb is in contact with, who want to build a demonstration sandbag house for Topnaar people who live along the river in small communities. Current housing relies heavily on corrugated iron, which does a poor job of staying cool; Sandbag houses have thick walls, which regulate temperature nicely. They hope to build a house here soon. Sand can also be used for science. Integral to the paleo-hydrology research is the use of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a dating method that can estimate the amount of time since a sand particle was last exposed to light. When quartz is buried, it contacts radiation from heavy metals underground, which change quartz molecules overtime. If exposed to light, this process is undone. So by taking samples of buried sand that looks like it was deposited by a flood, sand particles can be tested using OSL and the age of the flood can be better estimated.

Note: To be fair, this is still an office job. Read this in the context of normal psychological reactions to new places. Everything is new and exciting and I'm enjoying it immensely. There are challenges-the social life is odd and in some ways revolves around volleyball, and the work is computer heavy-but even these are kind of new and somewhat exciting for now.

Two anecdotes with animals

Before 2008 Fellow Alex Brooks left, he graciously volunteered my services on a paleohydrology research expedition. The hydrologists were interested in the maximum flood discharge of the Kuiseb in the 2009 flood, and used flood deposits-such as sand deposited by slack water and collections of driftwood hanging out of place in trees-and transects of the river to estimate the flood's size. To conduct this research, we spent a week hiking and camping in and around the Kuiseb Canyon a ways upstream of Gobabeb. On the first night we slept in the canyon, a small herd of mountain zebra group came down to drink from a watering hole left from full by the February floods. I heard them coming with exhilarating whinnies and loud stamps at the top of the canyon. When they final made it to the pond, I made out six equine silhouettes quiet now as they drank.

While collecting lizards of a visiting Master's student mini research project, we saw a small orange-tailed fellow run into a clump of spiky grasses; we crawled around the plant, and removed some sand to get at the lizard. As we dug, the three others screamed. I looked in and there was a Parabuthus villosus, the deadliest scorpion in the Namib. We carefully put it in an old ice cream container, where we also held three dune ants for lizard food. The ants sensing danger began to alternatively try to run away and attack the scorpion. The scorpion mostly knocked the ants away with its tail until one soldierly ant got a jaw-full of the scorpion's back leg. The scorpion tried to kick it off, but when it could not it swiftly pierced the ant with its stinger. The ant died immediately, but continued to hang onto the scorpion's leg. It was a gruesome sight, even though it was just an ant.