A Geologist's Memoir of the Kalahari.

A Geologist's Memoir of the Kalahari. 'No more than two feet high and ten feet across, it was a pieceof honest-to-goodness Precambrian basement poking its lovely, sensitivenose out of the desert floor. I hit it with my hammer and it rang like abell. This was no loose boulder. It was a solid outcrop of peridotite peridotite(pĕr'ēdō`tīt): see olivine. peridotiteCoarse-grained, heavy, igneous rock that contains at least 10% olivine, other iron- and magnesium-rich minerals (generally pyroxenes), and not more than 10% feldspar. , achunk of two billion year old mantle that was directly connected towhere the action was.' Had Raymond Chandler written of a geologist,searching for a 'lost' African rift valley, A geologist'smemoir of the Kalahari by CHRISTOPHER SCHOLZ (190 pages, 2 maps, 1997.Princeton (NJ); Princeton University Press; 0-691-01226-1 [pounds]19.95)might have been the result, if not the title. In the early 1970s, theUnited Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation decided that the keyto Botswana's future development lay in the Okavanga Delta, theonly source of fresh water. In advance of the planned development work,it commissioned a series of background studies; one of these was of thelocal tectonics, essential in a region that had experienced a majorquake in 1954. SCHOLZ was duly employed. Dust-cover reviewers enthuse en��thuse?v. en��thused, en��thus��ing, en��thus��es Usage Problemv.tr.To cause to become enthusiastic.v.intr. ofa book that tells of scientific fieldwork in the raw: the logistic andpersonal problems that go with all fieldwork. The problems are many;burgled by loquacious lo��qua��cious?adj.Very talkative; garrulous.[From Latin loqux, loqu teenagers in Rome, stampeded by nocturnalelephants in Chobe National Park Chobe National ParkNational preserve, northern Botswana. The preserve, which acquired national park status in 1968, borders Namibia and touches Zimbabwe and Zambia, covering 4,500 sq mi (11,700 sq km). It is noted for its wildlife, particularly its large elephant population. (although in mitigation, SCHOLZ'sparty did put his tents on the elephants' own path), the use of AirAlaska, an Air America-like, post-Vietnam, CIA CIA:see Central Intelligence Agency. (1) (Confidentiality Integrity Authentication) The three important concerns with regards to information security. Encryption is used to provide confidentiality (privacy, secrecy). offshoot, to get theirequipment to camp, getting a cold beer in Gabarone, and, not least, theabsence of solid rock in the Kalahari, an essential prerequisite ofseismic testing. Companion throughout is Teddy, a technician who can fixanything. A little of such power, however, can be dangerous: in makingjewellery from pop-bottle tops, Teddy falls prey to the desires of theGroovy Girls, teenage salesgirls, employed to lure young men intodrinking 'Groovy'. From one camp to another Groovy no. 1 seekshim out, and whisky-drinking Teddy has to be smuggled anywhere. Onlearning, from the dust-cover again, of SCHOLZ's encounters withterrifying Bushmen (in the 1970s!) I wanted to dislike this book fromthe first; instead I read it at one sitting, with an image of the lateRobert Mitchum as he might have been in the film version, and thethought, where are such books on archaeological fieldwork in the raw;compulsory reading for those preparing their first fieldwork campaigns?SCHOLZ found his rift valley, and his fieldwork was published as asmall paper in a technical journal in 1976. It is cited, apparently,every couple of years in minor papers about the local region. Whenrifting becomes academically 'popular' again, it might, SCHOLZhopes, get its 'day in the sun'.