Getting to know the neighborhood

My first month at Gobabeb was spent largely exploring Gobabeb and its immediate surroundings – and, despite the many “middle of a desert” jokes I could insert here, there is plenty to explore around here! In just my first few weeks, I was treated to a few different local excursions. My first was to the Mirabib archaeological site, just a stone’s throw away from Gobabeb.

Up the “mountain” Mirabib is the site of a massive inselberg [“mountain island” – a large granite boulder that, surrounded by the flat expanses of the gravel plains, does take on the appearance of an island oasis in a flat sandy-gravely sea], where MET [Ministry of Environment and Tourism: they’re the government agency that manages National Park areas like Namib-Naukluft] manages a number of campsites around the base of the inselberg. The views, as you can see from the photos below, are stunning, and the climb is tricky – the harsh heating and cooling regimen the granite is exposed to causes a lot of weathering, most often in the form of chunky layers flaking off of the rocks, which can lead to a lot of slipping and tumbling if you’re not careful (or graceful, whatever the case may be..).

I was headed to Mirabib with a visiting researcher from none other than the good ol’ University of Iowa! We were headed on an investigative/general reconnaissance mission to some of the areas around Gobabeb to look into an archaeological theory that needed confirming, and were going to be making stops at several of the old mines as well as Mirabib. I was invited along to lend a pair of eyes and feet to the mission, and because I hadn’t yet seen anything beyond the peak of Station Dune since arriving.

We were whisked away bright and early on a clear if chilly Saturday morning in a VW Polo on a classic African-massage-style drive down the gravel roads towards our destinations northeast of Gobabeb. I attempted to keep track of some landmarks as we were driving, but you know what driving on a gravel road in the gravel plains is like… Soon enough, we had reached our first destination: Hope Mine.

Hope Mine is one of a few abandoned mines in our stretch of the Namib-Naukluft Park. Mining in one form or another has taken place for a very long time in this area – first by the indigenous Topnaar people, more recently during the heyday of mineral prospecting in Namibia during the twentieth century. Despite their long history of use, Hope Mine bears little evidence of heavy mining activity beyond the capped boreholes, used to extract mineral cores to identify the location of mineral-rich veins, scattered among some tailings piles here and there.

Gorob Mine, our second stop, has more obvious remnants of its relatively recent mining past – there are still several rock shelters standing at the site, and the coring was much more extensive there. The landscape at Gorob is much more obviously altered than that at Hope – piles of multi-coloured rocks, ranging in size from pebble gravel to massive person-sized boulders, stand between winding trenches across the site, all of it made glittery by flakes of mica and schist mixed in with the granites and feldspar (shoutout to AndyGraham – I learned/remembered something in ESS!). Although entirely man-made, it has its own kind of beauty – even just the colours around the tailings piles; brilliant blues of copper sulphate, bright rusty reds from all of the iron slowly oxidizing. So many fascinating textures and colours … I’ll stop waxing poetic, you can check out the photos below.

Once we eventually made it to Mirabib, with our car surprisingly intact despite the road’s best efforts to dislodge and detach important components, we took a little time to explore the smaller rock outcroppings next to the main event. It was only on the return trip from East-West transects (forthcoming, promise!) that I got to climb the island mountain and take in some of the views. Inselbergs are common features across parts of Southern Africa, and are actually more than just fascinating sites for geological (and in this case, archaeological) investigation. They have also been found to provide surprisingly different microhabitats, favored by everything from the smaller colonizers of the desert (lichens,algae, fungi) to the big names (reptiles, birds, even some mammals). Granite inselbergs have been found to provide highly specialized microhabitat for a wide range of life forms around the world (much of the research has been done in Western Australia) and as “conservation oases” for sensitive species like reptiles. Mirabib and other granite inselbergs in the Namib are no exception, limited in their diversity only by the somewhat harsher climate and lower moisture availability, making these more than just a sweet photo op on an otherwise seemingly desolate landscape.

Down to the Wash After climbing atop these ‘mountains’, my next excrusion took me downhill, into some of the river washes that feed into the mighty Kuiseb. One in particular, named Welwitschia Wash, is famous for now-obvious reasons. I got to venture there on occasion of our continuing growth monitoring of the Welwitschias there.

Welwitschia mirabilis is, for those who have not encountered it, quite the amazing plant – deserving of its “miraculous” name. It is a gymnosperm in the middle of the Namib with evidence that members of its unique species grew as far back as the Lower Cretaceous epoch (or, between 140 and 100 million years ago, for those that need to brush up on their epochs) in parts of South America. This is back when Gondwanaland was still in existence, that merry time of the monolithic continent, and crazily enough, Welwitschia has been able to happily continue to live and survive, largely unchanged, ever since.

Besides being an ancient plant, Welwitschia also live to be ancient (relative to human/other plants) – the oldest known Welwitschia is in excess of 2000 years old! Welwitschia are endemic to the Namib, their range extending down from Angola just to the Kuiseb River catchment – so we at Gobabeb are at pretty much the southern limit of their range – and an especially important plant in Namibia. In fact, if you take a peek at Namibia’s coat of arms, which I’ve handily provided below, you’ll see I’ve circled a rather inauspicious-looking green wiggle beneath the shield bearing the flag decoration for the country. That is a Welwitschia! They are the national plant of Namibia – and how could you not be impressed by such an ancient but stubborn survivor?

As the pride of Namibia (or at least its botanists), lots of folks care about these plants – and Gobabeb has been researching Welwitschia for a long time, in the hopes of learning how best to ensure it lasts another 100 million years. To that end, some of the research performed by Gobabebeans has sought to discover everything from why it grows in particular places (and not others) to what contributes to successful germination. I highly recommend the comprehensive paper written by Goddess of the Namib Desert, Mary Seely, and former director of Gobabeb Joh Henschel, found here, to give you an idea of what the Welwitschia is like.

We continue to monitor Welwitschia growth today, in the same area and often with the same plants that Mary Seely and others have worked on before us. It was for this task that I was introduced to Gobabeb’s local Welwitschias –some in the area of Hope Mine and others in Welwitschia Wash – so that we could help one of the current research techs, Titus, collect growth data for their sample of the Welwitschia population. Others before us found that the Welwitschias’ rough sandpaper-like leaves grow only 0.2-0.8mm/day on average, but we’re still learning about what causes those spurts of growth, and generally keeping an eye on their health. (Learn more research deets at our fabulous website)

Unfortunately, as you can see from the picture above, the Welwitschias we were monitoring in the Wash didn’t have those long green leaves you see on the crest. The Welwitschias around Gobabeb have fallen prey to an unexpected (to me, anyway) predator in the area: horses. I know, who knew! The Namib is so diverse it even has wild horses! It’s actually a much less exciting discovery – the local Topnaar chief has a sizeable herd of horses he keeps on the land around here, releasing them to graze around the area. The Welwitschia leaves, as unpalatable as you’d imagine their sandpaper texture would make them, have just enough water in them to make them a target. Although those leaves hold less than a day’s water needs for the plants, it’s enough water to warrant a tough tug from a passing grazer-turned-browser. The result is sad, nibbled-to-the-cork Welwitschias – and frustrated researchers, since the horses ate the leaves we made measuring marks on – decorated with spools of half-chewed Welwitschia-leaf-cud, which is draped across the plants and strewn around the Wash like animal scat.

This, like so many other conservation-related issues, is political. Getting the horses to leave the Welwitschia leaves would require a lot more politiquing than Gobabeb has the authority or wherewithal to do, although we have communicated the problem to the country’s Minister of the Environment. For now, the Welwitschias in the Wash will have to dig a little deeper to keep on surviving.