Africa
eklemetti | March 30, 2009
Goma after the 2002 Eruption of Nyiragongo
The activity at Redoubt has captivated a lot of us, but in the grand scheme of things, its eruption are more likely to caused inconvenience and property damage rather than dramatically loss of life (unless something huge and unexpected occurs). However, the same cannot be said if Nyiragongo and/or Nyamuragira (a.k.a. Nyamulagira) in the Congo were to erupt. These volcanoes are close to the city of Goma, a city of nearly 600,000, not including refugees from the fighting in the region. Eruptions of Nyiragongo in 2002 prompted the displacement of 400,…
palmd | March 27, 2009Pope Benedict, the former head of the same Church body that ran the Inquisition, has done it again. He just committed an act which is morally equivalent to involuntary sodomy, and did it to an entire continent.
Africa, the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic, sometimes seems to have not all that much going for it---AIDS drugs are expensive, some leaders have been idiots, but there have been some bright lights, such as Botswana's comprehensive HIV prevention program.
So when some German dude walks in and tells everyone that condoms are wrong and may make the problem worse, one might consider…
amillikan | March 22, 2009Pope Benedict XVI provoked outrage amongst health officials last week when he stated that condoms were not the answer to Africa's fight against HIV and Aids, and could even worsen the problem. His comments came during the Pope's first visit to Africa, highlighting the Catholic Church's controversial stance which places a strong emphasis on sexual abstinence and fidelity to prevent the spread of disease. Professor Susan Wood, co-chair of the advisory committee for women's health, has indicated that the Obama administration is likely to reverse many of the Bush-era policies requiring…
eklemetti | March 16, 2009
Oldonyo L'engai, Tanzania
As with most disasters, the best way to prevent a Katrina-like catastrophe is preparedness. The best successes in volcanic mitigation have been in places where the combination of monitoring, communications and practice fit together like so many legos in a set, allowing for a calm and orderly evacuation when the eruption, or signs of eruption, began (e.g., Rabaul in 1994). This is why it is always heartening to me to see articles about places trying to implement hazard mitigation plans for their volcanoes. Two examples are in the news today:
(1) Officials in…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
gregladen | February 12, 2009And hominids.
We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record.
But I'd like to make the argument from another angle, that of modern ecological analogues. Let us assume that the greater apparent diversity of apes in the middle and late Miocene compared today can be accurately translated as a modern reduction in ape diversity. Not…
gregladen | January 9, 2009I think of her now as the Tea Lady, because she was drinking tea when I met her and had an English accent to go along with her English colonial outfit. She was one of the first native white South Africans I had met on my very first trip to that country. And now the Tea Lady, who was in fact a volunteer for the local historical society of a small town a couple hours drive north of Pretoria, was chugging her way up this steep, gravelly mountain path with the rest of us trailing behind gasping for breath.
This is the view looking up the Mwaridzi Valley from the eastern
entrance of Historic…
gregladen | January 4, 2009Helen Suzman was for many years a lone voice among white South Africans in power, actively opposing Apartheid. She died on New Years day at the ripe old age ofr 91.
She was buried today.
The mourners included President Kgalema Motlanther and the last leader of apartheid regime, F W de Klerk.
Mr de Klerk described Mrs Suzman as "one of South Africa's great icons".
"Suzman was my mentor, she was opposed to the abuse of power by the old apartheid regime," South Africa's opposition leader Helen Zille - who also attended the funeral - said.
"She was also opposed to the current abuses of power…
eklemetti | December 11, 2008
When people think about volcanic mitigation, a lot of time is spent worrying about monitoring and science. There is nothing wrong with this as we need to know what the volcano has done in the past and what it is doing now to predict its future activity. However, a very important piece of the mitigation puzzle is education, because without educating the public of the dangers of the volcano, many times they will not listen to officials when time for evacuation comes (see Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia in 1985). That is why this report from Tanzania is great: scientists going out and educating the…
gregladen | December 11, 2008
Something made me think of these toys, one shown above and other examples here.
I have seen incredible examples made of bamboo or other wood-like substances, sometimes incorporating bits of a tin can or some other material. The more sophisticated ones (often made by adults rather than the kids) are made of bicycle spokes.
Bicycle spokes are an important commodity in Central and East Africa (and probably elsewhere). They can be used to make these toys, but they also have another use you may not be aware of. Have you ever seen a likembe?
This is also known as a thumb piano. I'm sure…
gregladen | December 5, 2008
Sometimes called the Mountains of the Moon. The Rwenzori is really one giant mountain with several peaks. Since it is not formed through the usual process of tectonic folding, it is not really like other mountain "ranges." It appears to have been pushed up in the middle of the Western Rift Valley. Lots of bits of the earth get pushed up like this, but the Rwenzori may be the biggest such event contributing to the current landscape of the earth.
The Rwenzori is usually shrouded in cloud, and many people have spent many years in this area without seeing them. This photograph is…
gregladen | December 4, 2008
At the top of the gorge, a small stream just before it plunges about 60 meters into the gorge.
gregladen | December 4, 2008A kopje is a manadnock. Which, in turn, is an inselberg. Indeed, it may sometimes be called a Kakba, but that is the most obscure of all the terms for a very large lump sticking out of the earth all by itself. Like this:
In South Africa, this is called a "kopje" (pronounced "Cop eee" a lot like the English word "Copy" like "I am going to the Xerox machine to make nine copies of this thing"). The term Kopje is actually used across a wider range of English speaking Africa. Monadnock is a North American term and this phrase comes from a Native American (I think an Algonquian language,…
gregladen | December 2, 2008
Ceratotherium simum, or "White" Rhinoceros, a.k.a. Square-lipped Rhinoceros. Click the caption for a much larger image.
This is a young white, or square-lipped rhinoceros that was still traveling with its mom (not shown) at Pilanesberg, a mineral and game park in South Africa not far from the famous "Sun City" Casino northwest of Pretoria.
Notice the wide lip. It could easily be called the wide-lipped rhino to distinguish it form the other African species ("black" or "bush" rhinoceros). The mouth parts of this creature are actually designed to act as a lawn mower, as the animals spend…
gregladen | December 1, 2008This is my best bud Stephanie relaxing in her rock.
I have a whole series of photographs of Stephanie inside rocks. I think it is utterly hilarious that in an entirely unrelated stream of events, a friend of hers (whom I do not know) asked her to model for a photography class she was taking, and ended up shooting her has an earth mother goddess sort of thing emerging from a mossy spot in the ground. And here she is hanging out inside rocks. Must be something about Stephanie.
But wait, there's more...
The rock iteslf is gneiss. In fact, it is very nice gneiss. Gneiss is a metamorphic…
gregladen | November 30, 2008This particular elephant was one of the nicest elephants I've ever met.
click for a larger picture
I was leading a tour group in the vicinity of the Kruger National Park in South Africa. The local guide suggested that we could take a walk along a particular trail, as long as vehicles stayed near by in case of trouble. This is a pretty standard thing to do with tourists in Africa. They get tired of being in vehicles all the time. If you know an area well enough, and have the vehicles near by, you can walk around a while. This gives us a chance to show people things like plants and insects…
gregladen | November 17, 2008Amid calls by the rebel leader in the Congolese war, intensive fighting has broken out along the front lines among troops north of Goma, between Goma and Vitshumbi. This is a fairly large area of the Western Rift Valley nestled between the western rift wall and the Virunga Volcanoes (which is where the famous mountain gorillas live).
Details here.
I was once arrested for attempting to overthrow the government of Zaire in Vitshumbi, but was able to talk my way out of it pretty quickly. I was arrested by the Navy because, well, the Navy guy did not have a boat, and I did. In fact, I had…
awild | November 16, 2008
Pyramica ludovici - KZN, South Africa
I am still working through the South African ant photos I took this July. Progress is slow. I'm not terribly familiar with the African fauna, and the species have to be keyed out and checked against the literature so I can post images with the proper identification. All the same, I'm not 100%.
What I've learned in the process is that Brian Taylor's Ants of Africa site is indispensable. The interface is a bit web-1.0-clunky, but the content is exactly what I need. This morning I keyed the above Pyramica to the pan-African species P. ludovici in…
gregladen | November 11, 2008Today, French and other European dignitaries gathered at the site of Verdun, where an eight month battle between the French and Germans was carried out during World War I, also known as the Great War, or the War to End All Wars. This is Armistice Day, marking the end of that war.
There were no veterans from the Battle of Verdun present because none survive. In fact, there are hardly any veterans from World War I alive anywhere in the world today. There are ten verified veterans from World War I combat, and a handful of others who claim to be veterans but probably are not, or who were in…