This memoir of a three-month-long field expedition to northern Botswana tracks the adventures of a group of American scientists trying to gather critical data in some of the wildest and most inhospitable parts of Africa. The goal of the Scholz expedition was to determine, by recording tiny natural earthquakes, if a previously unknown arm of the East African Rift system had propagated into the Kalahari from the north.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In 1974, tectonic theoretician Christopher Scholz was at the beginning of what has become a distinguished career. Seeking field experience after graduate school, he signed on with the United Nations to conduct a seismological study of Botswana's Okavango Delta, where, he surmised, might lie a hitherto unknown branch of the great East African Rift. His account of how geological fieldwork is done presupposes that the reader have some knowledge of earth science, but it is also accessible to general readers. Of interest to all are Scholz's misadventures among 3.8-billion-year-old rocks, the oldest known on the planet, "remnants of a time when the Earth was a hot, roiling mass, just beginning to sort its primordial matter into crust, mantle, and core."
From Library Journal
Scholz (geological sciences, Columbia Univ.) provides an insider's view of geological field work with this account of the preparation and execution of a three-month expedition to Botswana in 1974. His first-person narrative is interesting and easy to read, but it is sometimes marred by a lack of focus and occasionally comes across as rather arrogant and judgmental. The scientific question behind the expedition is discussed but is often overshadowed by descriptions of personal circumstances and personalities. Although Michael Novacek's Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs (LJ 9/1/96) provides a more balanced, first-person look at fieldwork in a remote region, this book does provide interesting insight into the nature of the Kalahari. For larger science collections.?Jeanne Davidson, Oregon State Univ. Lib., Corvallis
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Review from Nature Magazine,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fieldwork (Hardcover)
In 1974 Christopher Scholz and his team carried out a survey of seismicity in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, at the request of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. They achieved some decent scientific results, but also had a whale of a time, with experiences varying from the comic through the awe-inspiring to the downright frightening.
Few Earth scientists write anything in the style of their life's memoirs, so this book is doubly welcome. It should appeal to a wide variety of readers, whether fieldworkers or not. The science is accessibly laid out and richly embroidered with tales of the bush.
The scientific problem that the team tackled was to discover whether there is an active extension of the East African rift system into Botswana. Is this the tip of the systems propagating itself southward? The question is potentially important because when a fault, such as that forming the edge of a rift, moves and generates an earthquake, there is a change of elevation along the line where the fault-plane reaches the surface. The Kalahari is very flat and the drainage system is in a delicate balance, around the Okavango delta, for example. A large change in the drainage pattern could easily be induced by only a minor movement, and lead to profound ecological consequences.
Botswana is not noted for big earthquakes, but any seismically active area produces many small earthquakes. So the survey had to deal with micro-earthquakes which, predictably, would turn up in sufficient number during the few months spent in the field. The technique is to install an array of three or more seismometers with recording devices, leave them for a day or several days, and then see what you have caught. Then the array is moved somewhere else, and so on.
But much of the Kalahari is covered with more-or-less unconsolidated sand, about the worst possible material through which to try to detect micro-earthquakes. As a result, much time had to be devoted to the search for areas of solid bedrock. This traveling about, setting up camp, overcoming obstacles, coping with the wildlife and, not least confronting officialdom, forms the substance of the book. It is rich in accounts of the incidents that such a mode of life throws up.
It was necessary, for example, to set up camp in a thick bush half a mile from the only watering hole for miles. The only clear strip of bush to camp on turned out to be the main route used by elephants at night on their way to have a drink. Add a few thousand nearby antelopes, lions, hyenas and so on, and the night becomes alarmingly noisy.
In the end, the party managed to observe a sufficient number of micro-earthquakes to confirm their hypothesis. The author comments that when the work was published, it did not cause a great stir, but he regards it as an honest and useful job well done.
Although much of the book is devoted to the sheer joy of life in the bush (and its perils), and is written so that you can almost smell the smoke of the camp-fire, the descriptions of occasional trips to town are just as evocative of Africa. We meet a rich array of ramshackle bars with ramshackle customers, we play plenty of darts and hear many a comic or curious yarn.
Perhaps the best is the one about the Afrikaner who, at a time of severe floods, managed one moonless night to drive across a bridge that not only had no handrail but was under two feet of water. On being asked how he managed this, he replied: "What bridge?"
Keith Cox is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3LY, UK.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Fieldwork,
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This review is from: Fieldwork: A Geologist's Memoir of the Kalahari (Paperback)
Although I am not a geologist or anything close to that I had hoped to glean something of interest about the geology of Botswana for a future visit. I had hoped to learn something of landforms, their history and what lies beneath the sand. The book contains not much of interest about the geology of Botswana but offers rather a sketch of what the field worker gets up to before, after and during field expeditions. Some of it is amusing but most is rather poorly described and put together. One gets no real sense of the characters or the places except perhaps of Rileys Hotel in Maun ( which is much different today). There is however, some interesting information about the connection between the seismic activity of the area to the south of the Okovango delta and the African Rift Valley off to the east so I did feel as if I came away with something useful. It also contains a lot of poorly rendered or inaccurate pieces of local language which are an annoyance.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining memoir of a field season in the Kalahari,
By
This review is from: Fieldwork: A Geologist's Memoir of the Kalahari (Paperback)
_____________________________________________Christopher Scholz, a geophysicist at Lamont-Doherty, went to Botswana in 1974 to lay out a seismic net to map microearthquakes. He encountered the typical obstacles of fieldwork in remote areas - poor maps, poor roads, lost luggage, obtuse bureaucrats - and site-specific challenges, such as charging elephants and hostile Bushmen. With perseverance, good humor, ingenuity - and lots of beer - he got the job done. "Teddy & I were sitting about 20 yards apart. We had been like that for "One thing I can say about you, Scholz, " said Teddy. "You sure can pick Anyone who's spent much time doing fieldwork - or wants to confirm Cheers -- Pete Tillman
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