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What a desert!
Drought is a terrible curse, aridity is not. What do I mean? The other day I toiled with my chainsaw to fell and cut up a couple of garden trees killed by drought. Our state, Tasmania, is renowned in Australia as one of this country's best-watered regions, yet two years of well-below-average rainfall coming on the heels of a general drying trend has reduced soil moisture drastically. But our below-average twenty inches for 2007 would be considered a punishing flood year for the Namib Desert which averages 0.4 inches of rain a year! Tasmania is in drought, the Namib is naturally arid. Our native flora and fauna is suffering, but the rich array of plants and animals of the Namib is doing just fine, thank you.
Though much of the Namib is barren of vegetation by our standards, it nevertheless supports a thriving ecosystem of wondrous plants and animals fitted by God for such extreme conditions. If Tasmania's rainfall were to drop permanently to the Namib's level, probably nothing would survive here. If the Namib received our drought rains for a long time, possibly everything would perish. Those species so superbly designed for the environment would fall into the permanent sleep of extinction.
If I were living in the Namib Desert right now I'd be less concerned about the forbidding blue skies than I am here. You see, God created planet earth with a staggering diversity of environments, including deserts and drylands which together occupy one-third of global land area.1 (Some lifeless deserts can be found, but these are probably all the result of human folly.) Earth's naturally arid regions sing God's praises as much as do its lush green forests, and they may be as important to the overall smooth functioning of our planet and its ultimate productivity as are its steamy jungles. The iron-bearing dust kicked up by winds in arid regions may hold the key to ocean phytoplankton productivity. We would not be overstating the case to say that without desert dust the ocean food chain would collapse. No more tuna sandwiches. Certainly, "dust produced in arid areas has important and disparate effects throughout the Earth system."2
Situated on the southwest corner of Africa, the desert stretches 1200 miles (2000 km) north-south but only averages 70 miles in breadth. The cold Benguela Current coursing up the coastline forces moisture-laden winds coming off the open Atlantic Ocean to drop their contents before breaching the shoreline. Its parched coastline was long ago dubbed "the skeleton coast"
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by mariners. This "desolate ribbon of contrasting rock, gravel and sand, is truly one of the world's most inhospitable places".3 Inhospitable maybe, but a "Living Eden" nevertheless. The unique alchemy of current and onshore winds results in an amazing phenomenon - sediments washed into the sea in huge quantities by the Orange River further south are carried north by the currents, dumped on top of all the sailors' skeletons, then blown inland, creating a vast region of sand dunes containing the tallest dunes in the world. All part of the divine plan, of course, to create yet another natural geographical wonder redounding to the glory of God.
The Namib is a vast treasure trove of amazing plants and animals, many found nowhere else. You have beetles designed to make use of another remarkable Namib feature - heavy fogs, produced by the meeting of cold water and warm air, that roll many miles inland in the early morning. When the cues beckon, the beetles mass on the top of the seaward side of tall dunes, stand on their heads and wait for gravity to drag droplets of condensed water down to their mouthparts. In one sitting/standing a beetle can drink up to 40 percent of its original body weight. Inspired by this dime-sized wonder of creation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have produced a new material that can capture and manipulate tiny amounts of water!
The list of fascinating creatures, both invertebrate and vertebrate, familiar and unfamiliar, goes on and on - "mathematical" spiders, ants, chameleons, crickets, snakes, jackals, golden moles, ostriches, vultures, gemsboks and even elephants that are all perfectly equipped to flourish in the harsh environment. Then you have the Namaqua sand grouse which can fly many miles from its scrape to a water hole, fill its breast feathers with 40 ml of water and fly back to deliver the life-saving liquid to its young. My personal favorite is a plant, Welwitschia mirabilis, a shrub-like "relative" of pine trees and California redwoods, that bears only two leaves during its entire lifetime of over two thousand years! These leaves grow several meters long and fray at the tips, creating a strap-like form that drapes over the ground in fantastical shapes. They grow in flat channels on gravelly plains where occasional "floods" provide long-lasting subsoil moisture.
Want a unique "seeing-God" holiday experience? Plenty of safari operators are just waiting to introduce you to the Namib's unique creation wonders.
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