Category: Americas and Eurasia and Africa

 

For quite some time, in the distant past, the Hoarusib River must have carried a lot more water, a lot more often, and had much more erosive power.

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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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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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This post’s featured photo was taken from essentially the same vantage point as yesterday’s; both “clock time” and my feet had advanced barely at all.

However, turning my/my camera’s gaze in a different direction (looking northwest rather than southwest, I think) offered a very different view.

You are looking at many different minerals; in some cases, they comprise rocky hills/mountains.

Others are present as “grains of sand”…grains which have different densities, and which –  to a considerable and visible  extent – have been “sorted” by the wind.

The pink streaks are probably garnets.

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Although the vantage point remains the same, this post’s images were shot with a telephoto lens; effectively, their view of the Hoarusib River is nearly seven times “closer” than that offered by the image in this series’ previous post.

At this point, the river and its surrounding landscape are quite unlike where the Hoarusib – rarely, and briefly – delivers a readily-visible flow of fresh water to the “Skeleton Coast” edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Yet, where I stood – and the stretch of the Hoarusib visible in these photos – are only circa 30 minutes’ drive from the river’s oft-dryish mouth.

In a straight line, the ocean is almost certainly rather less than 20 kilometres distant.

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I urge you to have a good look around: enlarge the featured image and zoom in on every element within a very complex landscape.

Finding the river is no great challenge.

However, you will need “eagle eyes” to be able to discern any evidence of the lightly-used access tracks on which “our” vehicles had travelled along some of the Hoarusib River’s lower reaches, and then up to the hilltop vantage point.

Within the photo’s field of view – which is similar to that of a naked-eyed human’s – those tracks are the only man-made feature.

No human lives here.

Not even a single signpost has been erected.

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