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This post’s, the previous post’s, and the next post’s photos were all taken within the space of a very few minutes.
Their vantage points were not at all far apart.
This is a place where a very selective view can create a highly misleading impression.
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You are looking at a “succulent” which is highly prized by gardeners, worldwide.
Very probably, this wild, uncultivated one is an example of Cotyledon orbiculata, commonly known as “pig’s ear”.
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Some Namib-dwellers – plants and animals – look extremely tough, “hard-shelled”, “brutal”.
Others, however, have a surprisingly “delicate” appearance.
I have no idea of even the common name of the pictured example.
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This post and the next two in this series are devoted to striking examples of plants that have evolved/adapted to survive in the least-rainy part of the Namib Desert.
The featured image’s stark centre of attention is (I am almost sure) a particularly hardy member of the geranium family.
It is probably one of the “Sarcocaulons” – members of what was formerly the generally-recognised genus Sarcocaulon.
Since 1996 these plants are usually numbered as members of the genus Monsonia.
One species – which may or may not be the one pictured above – contains a highly flammable resin which persists even when the plant is “dead”…or “dead”-ish.
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A hunch about the “castles”…
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The Hoarusib is one of several ephemeral Namibian desert rivers that have generated so-called “sand castles”, or “clay castles”.
These extraordinary landforms’ origins and age are shrouded in mystery, speculation, and competing theories.
I am quite unable to offer a definitive explanation, other than to quote some good sense from Roger Swart:
…there is abundant evidence that the silts were deposited by high-energy flows, separated by times of calm……The most likely explanation for the deposits is therefore flash floods during a wet period, which would have brought down a heavy sediment load that was dumped when the energy of the river waned.
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This post’s photos are not looking at the nearby “castles”, but the pictured bones, the cracked “skin” of the ground on which some of them sit, and the “castles” are all existentially indebted to the same kind of event.
It is an event that very rarely and only very briefly occurs in this nigh-rainless place: the Hoarusib River in silt-laden flood, so close to the Atlantic’s “Skeleton Coast”.
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This post’s photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken at 10.14 am on 14 November 2022, nearly twenty minutes after the previous post’s.
We were making our way back down to the bed of the Hoarusib River, which we would then drive along a little further inland, before turning left, into a canyon that the Hoarusib occasionally “invades”/floods.
That canyon has “sandcastles” that are vastly bigger – and enormously older/more durable – than any sandcastle on any seashore…as you will see in #11 & #12 of this series.
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