PAST WORK AND FUTURE
PROGRESS – GEOMORPHOLOGY IN THE NAMIB (GBB)
Chair: Dr Sue Ringrose
Attendees: About forty participants of the SASQUA meeting at Gobabeb
A meeting was held at Gobabeb towards the end of the
SAAG-SASQUA conferences on 15/09/12 to discuss the future possible role of GBB
in co-ordinating research and disseminating research products in a way that
would be both stimulating and interesting to the larger scientific community.
During the course of the meeting, Dr Seely explained that
GBB would likely soon find itself within an UNESCO World Heritage Site which
should make it easier to promote scientific research and provide the protection
needed for endemic (and other) fauna and flora and their habitats/environment.
A particular initiative would be to hold an annual Desert
Research Network meeting at GBB where all desert research results could be shared
via an international forum starting in 2013 with all welcome. (see below)..
Most of the SASQUA research scientists and students attended
the meeting and considered the potential in terms of services/data that GBB
offers in relation to seven possible themes namely:
- Morphology/movement of sand dunes – dust issue
- Archaeological questions
- Palaeohydrology of Kuiseb (and other ephemeral rivers)
- Palaeo-climatic reconstruction – from range of sediments and dating techniques
- Duricrust formation – gypcrete/calcrete esp. in relation to fog – water table change
- Soil, landscape, plant inter-relationships
- (Physical) weathering rates including salt effects
While useful,
these themes were generally considered somewhat narrow with a need to broaden
the overall scope and promote more integrated work – usefully avoiding the term
‘geomorphology’ – maybe replacing it with integrated earth science (IES)
While details were considered, the general feeling of the
group was that:
- GBB is ideally placed as a centre for all aspects of inter/multi-disciplinary desert research
- That the best way to promote inter-active/inter-disciplinary research based out of GBB was to hold annual meetings around integrated desert research and to invite regional and international participants (and possible keynote speakers)
- The inter-disciplinary areas to include earth/biotic/atmospheric and marine sciences
- Biannual SAAG or SASQUA meetings could be run in conjunction with these meetings
- The annual integrated desert research meeting should involve participants from the SPACES project (marine, terrestrial and atmospheric) who could then interact with personnel from the ongoing GBB atmospheric monitoring collaborators, including Max-Plank atmospheric monitoring group, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & University of Basel land-surface monitoring and the BSRN stations
- Variability of fogs events/intensity in the light of climate change
- Application of recent remote sensing techniques (lidar, hyperspectral, MISR-HR package, etc)
- Use of mine exploration data from terminated exploration/operating leases – for stratigraphic control especially on buried alluvial channels
- Development of dust related projects (aerosol work)
- Coastal erosion/deposition in light of recent sea level rises
- More extensive archaeological/cave midden work along upper-mid Kuiseb.
- Plant biotech research on desiccation tolerance
- The development of scientific materials for international dissemination in earth system science - SR to follow up with S.A. ACCESS (South African Centre for Earth System Science) who put out similar material on the web
- Contact University of Stellenbosch to determine whether their Masters students in Scientific writing (in Dept of Journalism) can be involved in research dissemination
- Promote integrative ideas like the development of the Dune Atlas
- Promote and protect sites of serious scientific interest (especially known archaeological sites) in the light of increasing tourist numbers (and as result of Adventure Tourism Global Meeting in Namibia)
- Promote the use of GBB facilities for taught African experience masters programmes with the need for research activities with communities.