Talk:Kalahari Desert

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Africa Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Africa, which collaborates on articles related to Africa in Wikipedia. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Botswana.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Namibia. See also Portal:Namibia.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

Contents 1 Boar? 2 Fossil Desert 3 Use of the word desert 4 Red sand 5 size (area)

[edit] Boar?

"There are some wild boar located on the Kalahari Desert and are prized for their instinctive and infected taste." What is the meaning of this sentence? --XXxJediKnightxXx (talk) 19:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I edited out the boar sentence until somebody can explain it.--XXxJediKnightxXx (talk) 15:21, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Fossil Desert

"Parts of the Kalahari receive over 250 mm of erratic rainfall annually ... making the Kalahari a fossil desert."

I don't find the term fossil desert on Google. Can anyone define?

Same as a paleodesert, a fossil desert is basically a region that used to be a desert but which now gets more precipitation. It retains a lot of the desert geology such as sand dunes, though. I just added some stuff on this to the desert article, but I didn't have enough to create a whole separate article on it. Bryan 20:42, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

I have, therefore, changed the link from to point to the section in the desert page :Aidan (Not affiliated with the original question, just passing through)

---

Have edited this page, removing the obscenities that appeared when the edit page showed up. Whoever put them in is obviously an incredibly mature person, who has a great deal of time to make fun of a people whom they neither understand nor want to understand. Congratulations on the perpetuation of Bushman-hating. !xuxobo

Don't let them get to you - vile obscenities appear on any page that gets anon traffic. Sometimes you can even tell which school has set an assignment on a given topic... Makes you pray for the date assignments are due and the horrid children move on to destroy a different page. (*sigh*) Well done on the quick fix, btw! JackyR 15:30, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of the word desert

There seems to be some confusion here concerning the word desert in relation to the Kalahari.

Geographically, the Kalahari is best defined by the extent of `The Kalahari Sands' which are an ancient wind-blown deposit and the youngest unit of the Kalahari Group that cover over 2.5 million km² of Southern Africa. The region has indeed experience both wetter and drier conditions than today but that is not the reason it is called a desert. The term is misleading and few geographers or ecologists use it. Rather the terms hyper-arid, arid and semi-arid are preferred and refer to the balance between mean annual rainfall and potential evapotranspiration. This changes in broadly south west (around Bokspits in Botswana) to north east (up past Tsabong, Kang, Ghanzi towards Maun) direction as it gets progressively wetter. It is only called a desert because of the lack of surface water.

For excellent reviews on the physical and ecological characteristics of the Kalahari refer to either Michael Main's book, "Of dune and delta", or the now harder to find Thomas and Shaw "The Kalahari Environment".....

User:Tom 14:38, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

hello

[edit] Red sand

"The Kalahari is known for its red sand. This odd occurrence is a result of its location near many rivers"

How does the location of rivers turn sand red? Would it not be better to mention the mineral composition or something like that? 195.190.143.254 07:13, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, will remove this as incomprehensible. In fact the shale in this area is red, and is presumably the source of the sand, but that doesn't really help. JackyR | Talk 23:33, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] size (area)

• List of deserts by area shows it as only 260,000 km² (100,000 sq. mi.) — presumably referring (quite properly!) to the Kalahari Desert in the narrow sense: the true desert portion only.
• If it is 900,000 km² as stated in the present article, then "562,500 sq. mi." is a mis-translation, should be: 350,000 sq. mi.
• If it takes up "most of the area" of the Kalahari Basin, as stated there, then it must be greater than 1,200,000 km²

Haim Berman 11:16, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

thanks, i see the "562,500 sq. mi." has been reduced to 362,500 sq. mi.

— Haim Berman 14:34, 23 July 2007 (UTC)