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All of this post’s photos were taken from the bed of the Hoarusib River, less than 20 kilometres from where it (on occasion) meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Here, rainfall is a very rare event.
The featured image shows ducks flying along a river; most of the time, terrestrial animals can walk across the lower reaches of the Hoarusib without wetting their feet.
The ducks’ presence is much less “surprising” than most people imagine.
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At 5. 26 pm on 14 November 2022 we stood on shifting sand, and in pleasantly cool air.
Below, in front of us, was the Atlantic Ocean, lapping Namibia’s “Skeleton Coast”.
We stood in a “sea” of sand – sand, only, it seemed.
However, the beach/coastal plain below us was clearly not devoid of vegetation.
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The world’s oldest desert gives its name to one of the world’s sunnier, hotter, dryer (and least-populated) nations.
Q: so why would a series that celebrates the northwestern portion of the Namib Desert begin with a photo taken on an Atlantic Ocean beach, as obviously-moist air swirled around me, on a cool early evening?
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When it is a very hot liquid, lava appears red.
As it cools, it becomes black/ish, and its flow slows.
As it cools more, it ceases to flow, is no longer lava, and has become rock – most commonly basalt, of a black/ish hue.
(“Punters” – yours truly included – often speak of “lava rock”. Geologists disdain that term. The geologists are right: “lava” is liquid, rock is solid. “Lava rock” is an oxymoron)
Basalt is the most common component of the earth’s crust.
However, not all volcanic rock is basalt, nor is black the colour of all relatively freshly-emitted basalt.
Also worth remembering: lava, steam, and hot gases are not volcanoes’ only “fresh fruits”.
Some volcanoes – and Etna is at times one of them – also “throw up” chunks of solid rock.
This post’s heroes may or may not be two such rocks.
Certainly, only their hue is currently “hot”.
On 30 September 2023 both were “cool”, temperature-wise.
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As you can see, the total absence of clouds “up there” proved fleeting.
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This chapter’s images were taken circa two minutes later than were the previous post’s.
Here, the photos’ sense of height, scale and distance is pretty close to how a naked-eyed human would perceive them.
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The big volcano is very dynamic, always engaged in a closely monitored – but not entirely predictable – “dance” of destruction, construction, collapse, erosion and “quieter periods”.
The cloud-dance on Etna’s upper slopes is even more quickly-shifting – variously, arriving, departing, thinning, thickening, “setting in”, and “burning off”/“dissolving”.
Just a couple of minutes earlier – when I took the previous post’s photos – we were yet to enjoy more than fleeting glimpses of small parts of this post’s crater-scape.
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This post’s photos were taken 15-20 minutes after the previous chapter’s.
We had walked up a little higher, staying on a marked path.
For several minutes, most of upper Etna had been invisible to us, but the clouds which had fully-enshrouded us were now fracturing, lifting, starting to “dissolve”.
At 11.40 am we were probably standing a whisker below 3000 metres above sea level; the pictured, freer-roaming folks were, variously, a little higher up or lower down.
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…well, members of a closely-related species…which is also sometimes seen on volcanoes, thousands of metres above sea level.
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This post’s photos were taken just moments after the previous one’s; the very same lava flow was the relevant “destroyer”.
Both images show the same structure, in which humans had lived.
Q1: how many people died as a result of that lava flow?
Q2: how many humans has Europe’s biggest currently-active volcano directly killed during “recorded history”?
(I.e. since circa 1500 BC – a little more than 3, 500 years ago. Etna was already active for circa half a million years before humans began to “monitor” it)
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