Etosha Pan

Today’s post is courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory. The pictures are one’s none of us will get to take unless we worked for NASA of course.

Etosha National Park, in northern Namibia, is dominated by a massive mineral pan, Etosha Pan. It is a large, dry lakebed in the Kalahari Desert. The 120 kilometre long (75 mile long) lake and its surroundings are protected as one of Namibia’s largest wildlife parks - Etosha National Park.

About 16,000 years ago, when ice sheets were melting across Northern Hemisphere land masses, a wet climate phase in southern Africa filled Etosha Lake. Today, Etosha Pan is seldom seen with even a thin sheet of water covering the salt pan.

The Etosha area was used as a backdrop during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Two images taken about nine months apart document an unusually wet summer in southern Africa. The upper view (March 2006) shows the point where the Oshigambo River flows into the salt lake; the lower regional image (June 2005) shows the same inlet—but dry—on the north shore of Etosha Pan.

The Oshigambo River is almost never seen with water, but in early 2006, rainfall twice the average amount in the river’s catchment generated flow. Greens and browns show vegetation and algae growing in different depths of water where the river enters the dry lake (upper image, center). Typically, little river water or sediment reaches the dry lake because water seeps into the riverbed along its 250 kilometre (55 mile) course, reducing discharge along the way. In this image, there was enough surface flow to reach the Etosha Pan, but too little water reached the mouth of the river to flow beyond the inlet bay. The unusual levels of precipitation also filled several small, usually dry lakes to the north (upper image, right).

The salt desert supports very little plant life except for the blue-green algae that gives the Etosha its characteristic colouring and grasses which quickly grow in the wet mud following a rain. Away from the lake there is grassland that supports the grazing animals.

 

This harsh dry land with little vegetation and salty water if any at all supports little wildlife all year round but is used by a large number of migratory birds. In particularly rainy years the Etosha pan becomes a lake approximately 10 cm in depth and becomes a breeding ground for flamingos, which arrive in their thousands.

 

The surrounding savanna is home to a number of mammals that will visit the pan and surrounding waterholes when there is water, these include large numbers of zebra, Blue wildebeest, and springbok as well as white rhinoceros, elephants, wild dogs, lions, leopards and others.

 

The Etosha pan is completely within the national park and is designated as a Ramsar wetland of international importance and a World Wildlife Fund ecoregion.

 

I'll be spending 6 nights camping in the three camps in Etosha National Park.  I'm really looking forward to it and bringing you my photographs taken at Etosha Pan.