Carnival of the Arid #6
In the mirror, Castleton Tower and Priest & Nuns; ar right, Parriott Mesa. Photo by stalwart CoTA contributor Richard Schwartz.
It’s another Carnival of The Arid, a slightly abbreviated one in this case. But short doesn’t mean lackluster! We have, to start off, a rather compelling entry from Sarah Koschak and Andrew Skeoch. Sarah and Andrew, whose photography and sound recordings have graced previous Carnivals of The Arid, take us on a trip to the Rann of Kutch, a seasonal desert wetland in India between the Thar Desert and the Arabian Sea. Sarah’s photos and Andrew’s narrative from that trip — imagine getting lost on a flat, featureless plain covering about 10,000 square miles — are compelling and wonderful. Sound recordings of the local wildlife, excerpts from Andrew and Sarah’s album “The Great Rann” — are available for your listening at the post.
Ole Nielsen, whose first contribution to Carnival of The Arid appeared in the previous installment, provides some insight into the atmospheric and oceanographic patterns that help create coastal deserts. Focusing on the Namib and Atacama deserts, Ole describes the parallels between them — each is on the west coast of a southern continent, and each fronts up against a stretch of ocean cooled by cold currents coming deep water to the south. As Ole writes, that cold water meets the warm trade winds blowing ashore:
The shallowing land forces the cold deep waters up to the sea surface where the waters may encounter warm winds that blow land-ward. The warm air cools as it moves across the cold current and the air becomes too cold to hold much moisture. No rain clouds, therefore, can reach the coast and the land dries into a hostile area for life.
There are other ways deserts form, rainshadows being probably the most familiar to North Americans, but the Atacama and Namib are quite notable among the world’s deserts for their extreme dryness, and Ole’s explanation sheds an intiguing light on their creation.
Elizabeth Enslin, over at Yips and Howls, and crossposted at The Clade, turns our attention to a different sort of cold ocean: the sea of sagebrush that occupies most of the Great Basin Desert. Sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata, is one of my favorite native plants, an interesting case study in paleobotany and wildland genetics, and yet, as Liz writes, so common that people in sagebrush country don’t even see it any more:
The plant is the climax species for an ecosystem that once covered 150 million acres – or nearly half – of the American West. This ecosystem still has the largest habitat range in the United States and covers major parts of eleven western states. Yet sagebrush steppe is one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.
Huh? How can something so vast be so endangered?
Go read the rest and find out.
The redoubtable Silver Fox brings us an up-close-and-personal look at lizards she found at Westgate, Nevada, gateway to Gabbs. She explains why she got out as Westgate here, kinda, but the lizards she finds once out of the truck are explanation enough for me. That stretch of Route 50 is called the “loneliest road in america,” but like anywhere else in the desert, it’s only lonely if you don’t look under the rocks for company. The blue-bellied lizards she documents seem like pleasant enough companions to me.
And speaking of lonely desert destinations that turn out busy, my own submission is this piece on the little Mojave Desert town of Nipton, where I lived much of last year. The Raven and I were back a couple weeks ago, and it still felt like home.
That’s it for our abbreviated CoTA#6. In comments, leave links to your own submission in comments here. If you’re featured here, don’t forget to send your readers over to check out the other submissions.
And a question for readers and submitters: Has this carnival run its course? Have we saturated the Internet’s need for an arid-lands blog carnival? Is the dwindling of submissions a telltale sign that we’ve done our job, or is it just a reflection of my slightly lackluster promotion of it the last couple of months? Or is everyone just out in the desert instead of on the Internet? Feel free to opine in comments as well.
Comments
Looks like a pretty good CotA to me, and I’m looking forward to checking them out.
Maybe people just aren’t thinking deserts in the summertime?
Or it’s hard to bring the computer to the beach?
I’ll try to have something in next time. Might be re-frying the beans, but maybe something new.
Chris, this is a great write up, and these are still high-quality submissions, I think. Maybe readers (and submitters?) like the desert better in the winter? And yeah, I have kind of left my first West Gate posts hanging a bit, so your “here, kinda” is apropos, and funny.
This is a fine CotA. Fewer submissions is not a bad thing if they’re high quality like these. Summer’s a busy time, and people are often in remote places. I know it’s been hard for me to keep up with blogging, twittering, carvinaling, etc. I’ll keep trying (though I don’t live in a desert, so I may not be able to contribute every month).
Great carnival! Summer has kept me from blogging as much as I’d like, but I still find links to other arid-related blogs very interesting.
I’m still enjoying the CotA as much as before. All of the submissions are excellent. Agree with everyone else who has mentioned that summer may have something to do with the drop in number of submissions. I should have tried to contribute something, but the short of it is that my life has been so chaotic lately, that I have a hard time getting my act together to do much of anything. I’m hoping that may change soon.
Page 1 of 1 pages
