In Arid South African Lands, Fracking Controversy Emerges by Todd Pitock: Yale Environment 360 In Arid South African Lands, Fracking Controversy Emerges The contentious practice of hydrofracking to extract underground natural gas has now made its way to South Africa’s Karoo, a semi-desert known for its stark beauty and indigenous plants. But opposition is growing amid concern that fracking will deplete and pollute the area’s scarce water supplies. by todd pitock On a cool day in May, Jonathan Deal, the 52-year-old owner of an ecotourism farm called Gecko Rock, strikes up a steep kopje at a pace most people maintain going downhill. As he leads a few visitors on an all-day hike across his 10,000-acre property in the South African bush, he steps onto boulders covered in red lichen and points out — in Latin, Afrikaans, and English — the species of the indigenous flora called fynbos, whose flowers and shoots color this vast semi-desert of the Karoo. Deal is obviously in his element. But it’s also apparent that he is more full of zeal than joy, his mood betrayed by his preoccupied gaze.

“Look at this,” he says, fingering a hundred-year-old creeping aloe thriving on the hillside. “Once this is gone, it cannot be replaced. They say they’ll leave it all better than they found it. How is that possible? I tell you, it is not possible.” “They” are a group of global energy companies — including Royal Dutch Shell, South Africa’s SASOL, and others — that have leased rights to an immense shale field that runs across the country’s midsection. The companies have promised billions in revenue, much-needed jobs, and energy security for all. But the issue here — as in similar natural gas-rich shale fields in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere — is largely over how the gas is harvested, namely a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which uses a South Africa has placed a moratorium on future fracking permits until the environmental impacts can be evaluated. combination of water, sand, and chemicals to crack the subterranean rock where gas (and oil) are trapped.

And as intensifying publicity about the environmental risks of fracking has spread from the United States to South Africa, opposition to hydrofracturing in the Karoo has grown, prompting the South African government to place a moratorium on all future fracking permits until the practice’s environmental impacts can be evaluated. The controversy has put the government in a tough spot. Seventeen years after the end of apartheid, the African National Congress-led government is under pressure to deliver jobs, services, and greater prosperity to the country’s largely impoverished and increasingly impatient population. The sparsely populated, semi-desert Karoo has a mixed-ethnic population of 300,000, including native Khoisan people, other black Africans, and white farmers. Many of the region’s residents live in squalid settlements that are a remnant of the apartheid era, and the government clearly hoped that a hydrofracturing boom would bring jobs and greater prosperity to the region. Opposition to fracking in the Karoo has been centered not in the black settlements, but more among the white farmers and landowners who fear that the industry will pollute and deplete already scarce water supplies in this rain-starved region.

Each fracking drilling well requires millions of liters of water and produces large quantities of tainted wastewater that must be treated. Photo courtesy of Todd Pitock The semi-desert Karoo is known for its variety of endemic flora and fauna, including succulent plants and small reptiles. In February, Deal, along with an environmentalist named Lewis Pugh, formed Treasure the Karoo Action Group , or TKAG, to organize opposition. The two men say they have spent a combined $60,000 of their own money, plus another $26,000 raised in small donations. Pugh, whose mother’s family first came to the Karoo almost 200 years ago, is a well-known figure here who has drawn attention to water-related issues by swimming in extreme environments wearing just a Speedo, cap, and goggles. “‘Karoo’ comes from a Khoisan word for ‘thirsty land’,” Pugh told me in Cape Town. “Even if the chemicals were safe, and they are not, there just isn’t enough water to spare. Water is going to be a source of conflict. Do you think the Karoo farmers are going to let Shell show up and destroy their farms?

They’re going to grab their rifles.” Shell and other oil and gas companies say that hydrofracturing can be done in an environmentally safe way, and would bring jobs and lease income to the people of the Karoo. But Pugh and other opponents counter that the wells will produce for as few as five years, so the jobs and the benefits will be temporary. The damage, however, will be permanent, says Pugh, including the infrastructure required to retrieve the gas and the heavy trucks and equipment that will rumble through, turning parts of one of the planet’s most pristine and biodiverse environments into an industrial zone. Interest in natural gas fracking in the Karoo is, as in many other places, a relatively new phenomenon, in large part because new horizontal drilling technology enables gas companies to drill a single well and exploit gas reserves for many miles to the side. In the Karoo, industry officials argue that there is no risk to water and the environmental impact, above or below the surface, will be minimal. The natural gas they’re harvesting, they say, is at an average depth of 2,500 meters — 2,000 meters below the deepest aquifers.

The companies say their drill bits, the size of a coffee table, run through a poured concrete funnel within stainless steel casing, forming an impermeable barrier. Because of horizontal drilling, Shell says it intends to drill only 8 to 24 wells over a 35,000-square-mile area. South Africa divides land ownership between surface and subsurface rights. The “split estate” means that farmers and homeowners own the land they can see, while rights to any minerals or resources that lie below are the government’s to exploit. The fact that Karoo farmers and landowners do not stand to directly earn royalties, as they would in many parts of the U.S., ‘How will these companies be made accountable for the damages they might do?’ asked one farmer. is one reason residents in the Karoo are more resistant to fracking. TKAG, with a handful of core leaders and about 100 volunteers, has emerged as the main opposition group to fracking in the Karoo. Greenpeace is active, too. Another group, Earthlife Africa — a volunteer-based civil society organization — has called for a boycott of Shell.

Muna Lakhani, 54, the volunteer branch coordinator in Cape Town for Earthlife Africa, criticized Shell for ignoring the interests of the Karoo’s black residents, significantly overstating fracking’s economic benefits while underplaying the environmental impacts. “The bottom line is that the poor people in the Karoo have not been engaged by the Shell environmental management plan,” said Lakhani. “Some of them are living right on the edge, very precariously, and of course they don’t have everything they should have. One of the most precious resources is water. They don’t have the resources or the capacity to fight in court or to truck in water as wealthy people can. Shell has made it clear they’ll only consider compensation if it can be proved that the contamination came from their wells. Think of someone poor. How on Earth will they be able get justice?” The more prosperous white farmers in the Karoo also worry about water contamination and water shortages that could be caused by fracking. In June, a delegation of Karoo farmers visited Pennsylvania and New York, where gas fracking in the Marcellus Shale is intensifying. The visit seemed to do little to allay their fears, according to a report in the Huffington Post.

After listening to a representative from a landowner group that supports fracking, Karoo farmer Doug Stern reportedly said, “He speaks so glibly about the acreage he represents and how safe everything is. But how will these companies be made accountable for the damages they might do?” In his speeches opposing fracking in the Karoo, Pugh — whose supporters include Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Bishop Desmond Tutu — reminds listeners that South Africans had died for inalienable rights enshrined in the country’s 1994 Constitution, including access to clean water and a The worry is that the Karoo will become the arid twin to another drilling center, the Niger delta. healthy environment. Fracking in the Karoo threatens those rights, said Pugh. In May, a Shell official and Deal debated at the University of Cape Town’s School of Business. Bonang Mohale, chairman and vice president of Shell South Africa Marketing (Pty) Limited, argued that Shell had been fracking for 60 years and had not had a single incident at any of its 800,000 wells. “We use between three and eight chemicals per well, and never more than eight,” he later told me.

“They’re all 100 percent biodegradable.” If the claim was surprising — until late June, the makers of fracking chemicals in the U.S. had refused even to disclose the chemicals, saying they were proprietary secrets — his message was nonetheless a promise of hope: jobs and prosperity for a region where economic opportunity has dried up. He extolled Shell’s 109-year record in South Africa, saying it employs 1,400 people directly and has created 20,000 related jobs. At its facility in Durban, which it operates as a joint venture with BP, it produces 180,000 barrels of oil per day, and it was the first international oil company in South Africa to attain the government’s highest rating on affirmative action, Mohale said. The need for development is undeniable. The failure to deliver services is the African National Congress’s Achilles heel. The government has increased access to water and electrification, but it hasn’t managed to seriously dent the intractable poverty. MORE FROM YALE e360 READ MORE One of TKAG’s weaknesses is that while it is clear what the group opposes, it lacks an alternative vision for development.

“The Karoo is just fine as it is, thank you,” Mark Van Tubbergh, a TKAG loyalist from Cape Town told me. But that’s debatable. The only people making money in the Karoo are a relative handful of landowners who have turned their properties into hunting lodges. The farmers are either relatively affluent people like Deal, whose property is a second home, or poor people just getting by. En route to the beauty so beloved by environmentalists, you see passels of men braving windswept plains as they peddle boxes of fruit they’ve taken from fields. They are the ones who will doubtless suffer most acutely from water contamination or water shortages. But even as they live at the epicenter and stand to lose the most, they’re barely in the discussion. The worry is that the Karoo will become the arid twin to another drilling center, the Niger Delta in Nigeria — where local people have largely remained destitute as foreign oil companies have contaminated the land and the water. “You can’t put energy security ahead of water security,” Pugh said. “Water is life.

There is nothing without it.” Correction, August 4, 2011: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the South African firm, Sasol Ltd., as a state-owned company. Written by Bronwyn Paxton The Karoo Also known as ‘the Place of Thirst’, the Karoo is an infinitely magical region, covered by enormous sheep and game farms, where vast plains drift away towards distant rocky outcrops and multi-layered mountains that pierce the velvet skies. ‘Karoo’ is a Khoisan word of unknown origin, and is a semi-desert natural area of South Africa made up of two related eco-regions: the Nama Karoo (which mostly has winter rainfall), and the Succulent Karoo (which mainly has rain in the summer). The Nama Karoo has three primary sub-regions; the Upper Karoo in the north (which is separated from the Great Karoo in the centre by the Great Escarpment, leaving the Upper Karoo rivers to run northwards into the Orange River), and the Little Karoo in the south. The Succulent Karoo is located in the western portion of the area, located nearby to the Atlantic coast.

In geological terms, the Karoo Supergroup refers to an expansive and geologically recent sequence of sedimentary and igneous rocks, which is flanked to the south by the Cape Supergroup, and to the north by the older Witwatersrand Supergroup. It spreads over more than half of South Africa and reaches in certain areas to 8,000 metres below the land surface, constituting massive amounts of rocks that were formed in a relatively short space of time, geologically speaking. You could pause almost anywhere in the Karoo and simply listen to the beautiful silence whilst you breathe in the scent of earth and stare into the remarkably clear horizon that seems like a line drawn across the opposite end of the earth. The midnight skies are crystal clear and are speckled with thousands of stars and big, bright planets. Other galaxies can even be seen with the naked eye, providing you with some of the world’s finest star-gazing. Fossils of some of the earliest kinds of one-celled life have been found in the Karoo, demonstrating that life has existed in this area for over three billion years. The richness of pre-dinosaur fossils in this area is famous the world over.

To fully experience the enchantment of this region, you should venture off the main national road, where you will find peculiar little hamlets, sprawling farmsteads and historical towns inhabited by friendly and hospitable folk who are more than happy to share their tales and legends. The Great Karoo spreads over an area of over 400,000 square kilometres. From a geological point of view it has been an expansive inland basin for almost all of the past 250 million years. At one stage the area was glaciated, the evidence of which can be seen in the widely distributed Dwyka tillite. Later, at numerous times, there were enormous inland deltas, seas, lakes or swamps. Massive deposits of coal formed, which is now one of South Africa’s economy’s main pillars. Ancient reptiles and amphibians flourished in the dense wetlands, and their remains have brought fame to the Karoo in the palaeontology field. Approximately 180 million years back, volcanic activity took place on a giant scale, which effectively brought an end to the prosperous reptile evolution in the region.

Some of the Karoo’s extinct animals include aquatic and Triassic mammal-like carnivores, Permian predators, Jurassic herbivores and more. The fossils were first discovered by Andrew Geddes Bain, a Scottish man born in 1838, at a road cutting close by to Fort Beaufort. He sent his specimens to the British Museum, where fellow Scotsman Robert Broom recognised the mammal-like characteristics of the Karoo fossils in 1897. Subscribe The Great Karoo, South Africa - Journeys by Design Home / Destinations / South Africa / The Great Karoo The Great Karoo A vast and surprisingly varied biosphere, the Great Karoo spans large sections all three capes, stretches as far north as the Kruger and is finally receiving - from a growing band of travellers, wildlife experts and conservationists - the kind of attention once reserved for the likes of the Western Cape’s Fynbos regions. At the moment (2012) Journeys by Design operates itineraries based in Samara Private Game Reserve and Mount Camdeboo Private Game Reserve.

Classified as semi-desert, The Great Karoo is in fact a conglomerate of habitats, of mountain, savannah, grassland and desert, the so-called Nama and Succulent Karoos. The Succulent Karoo occupies the western third of the Great Karoo. The Nama Karoo, South Africa’s second largest biome, straddles much of the country’s central plateau. Both game reserves, Samara and Mount Camdeboo, are located along the eastern flank (in the Eastern Cape) of the Nama Karoo, where it’s predominantly desert characteristics - shrub lands, poor quality limestone soils - are partially broken up by proximity of the Sneuberg Mountains. Once exclusive home to the Khoi and the Sans peoples, the Great Karoo remained relatively untouched for thousands of years, its vast reserves of coal - its accompanying (great) fossil record - undiscovered. Unable to sustain large sedentary (cattle reliant) communities, it was considered uninhabitable - by the Bantu, the Dutch and the British. However, following the establishment of first early settler outposts, and then the building of the railway, it has been steadily occupied as of the eighteenth century.

The Great Karoo occupies an important part in recent South African history. Home to the Great Trek, it was an Afrikaner stronghold, its towns built around frontier communities - farmers, trekkers, fighters. A training ground, resource and great escape hatch for the Boer forces during the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), it was a major thorn in the side of the occupying British during the early twentieth century. With many of the Burgher Boers emigrating from the Eastern Cape, the area now occupied by Samara and Mount Camdeboo is significant for its provision of significant republicans, including South Africa’s first president, Andrius Pretorius, after whom Pretoria is named. Pretoria’s significance - and the fact of the staunch republicanism of its settler towns (Graaff-Reinet, for example) - made the Great Karoo a touchstone for both pro and anti- apartheid activity. Famously, Graaff-Reinet was the birth place and childhood home to Robert Sobukwe, the pan-Africanist interned on Robben Island.

Nearby, at Cradock, the assassination in 1985 of 4 anti-apartheid activists is widely seen as a turning point in the struggle for racial equality, with the then president, PW Botha, declaring a State of Emergency. For years a farming economy, and then a mining bedrock for the country’s emergent wealth, the Great Karoo is today a growing safari destination, not least along the Eastern Cape’s north-western flank, where well-managed restocking programmes have seen wild species flourish. In Samara and Mount Camdeboo, predominant species include springbok, oryx, eland, blesbok, buffalo, black wildebeest, giraffe, white rhino, Cape Mountain, cheetah and Burchell's zebra. Please not that elephant and lion are not found in either park, the aim being to preserve 500 year old species of Shepherd tree, and to ensure a the long term success of the areas dominant predator - cheetah. To find out more about Travel To The Great Karoo and to arrange your tailor-made trip, get in touch with us today.

South Africa How Karoo Lamb gets its unique flavour - The Travelling Chilli How Karoo Lamb gets its unique flavour . The Karoo is a semi-desert area in South Africa, located in the central and western part of the country. The Karoo encompasses nearly 40% of South Africa, comparable to the size of Germany. It is a very dry area with an annual rainfall between 50 – 250 mm. The name “Karoo” is derived from the Khoisan language, meaning “place of thirst”. The main vegetation of the Karoo consists of smaller bushes, shrubs, aloes and succulents that survive with low water. The vegetation is not very dense and typically you’ll see the shrubs about half a meter apart from one another. The biodiversity is high with around 6000 different types of vegetation counted in the total region, of which more than half are only found in this region. The Karoo is a very bio diverse semi-desert area in South Africa Due to the invention of windmills to pump up borehole water, farming became possible. Much of the Karoo area is used for goat and sheep farming who both thrive on the local vegetation.

Goat is used for mohair production and sheep for merino wool and meat. Karoo landscape with windmill for pumping up water When on a road trip in the Karoo, the area looks very desolate and not much livestock can be seen. The reason is that on average, each sheep requires minimum 4 hectare of farmland. As a result the farms in the Karoo region are huge. The roots of the plants keep the soil together. With too many animals grazing on a too small an area, the plants do not have the time to recover and when there is heavy rainfall the soil will erode. Karoo Lamb is unique and distinct in flavour Now what makes meat from Karoo sheep so unique and distinct in flavour? The Karoo has a harsh climate, cold winters and hot summers with hardly any rainfall. The indigenous shrubs endure this harsh climate and grow year round, while grass only grows in rainy season. The Karoo sheep mainly feed on this indigenous flora, which is nutritious as well as palatable to the sheep. These shrubs have a very herby aroma, varying from rosemary, thyme, sage, eucalyptus and lavender. One can say that the sheep flavour their own meat while grazing.

Even when walking around in the fields you can smell the herbs of the bushes and shrubs. It almost feels like walking around in a spice market. Sheep grazing in the Karoo The Karoo lamb and mutton is famous for its unique herby aroma and taste and so only sheep that have been grazing on these bushes will acquire this distinctive flavour. Karoo Lamb Certificate of Origin The real Karoo Lamb has a certificate of origin , recognisable by a sign of a windmill. It’s basically the same as with Champagne in France or with Parma ham in Italy. It specifies that only sheep that were grazing in an area that has at least two out of these six indigenous shrubs; Ankerkaroo (Pentzia incana), Kapokbos (Eriocephalus ericoides), Rivierganna (Salsola glabrescens), Silverkaroo (Plinthus karrooicus), Boegoekaroo (Pteronia glauca) and Skaapbossie (Pentzia spinescens). Kapok bush Moreover, the sheep have to be free ranging, but if 4 hectares of farmland are taken into account, one can definitely speak of free ranging.

When cooking or grilling the meat, you will notice that it hardly needs any extra flavouring with spices and herbs, due to its natural herby taste. Mutton steaks on the “braai” So when travelling around in South Africa and you get to spend some time in the Karoo region, definitely try out Karoo lamb. It’s a local dish, available in many restaurants and when you go for self catering, no problem to find the meat in most supermarkets or local butcheries. Just check for the Certificate of Origin. What has been your experience with food that had a unique flavour? What was it and where? If you like to share this post on pinterest: Karoo Karoo The Karoo has 2 sub regions, the Great Karoo and the Little The Karoo is a semi-desert region of South Africa. It has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo and the Little Karoo. Great Karoo Currently sheep farming is still the economic backbone of the Great Karoo with other forms of agriculture taking place in areas where irrigation is possible. Lately game farms and tourism have also started to make an economic impact.

Little Karoo As the name implies, the Little Karoo is the smaller (and more southerly) of the two Karoo sub-regions. Geographically it is a fertile valley (enclosed by the Swartberg , Langeberg and Outeniqua mountains ) that features many spectacular rock formations and passes. The main town of the region is Oudtshoorn , but some well-known mission stations such as Zoar, Amalienstein, Barrydale and Dysselsdorp are also situated here in the Little Karoo The Great Karoo - A Spectacular Semi-desert - YouTube The Great Karoo - A Spectacular Semi-desert Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Oct 10, 2014 I got to fly the Karoo semi-desert ... even got to chase some Angora Goats! The Karoo is a semi-desert natural region of South Africa.

It is partly defined by its topography, partly its geology but, above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold. About 180 million years ago, volcanic activity took place on a titanic scale in this area. Occupying an epic area of 40, 000 square kilometres, the Great Karoo sweeps through South Africa with spectacular semi-desert vegetation and a fascinating history. Once an enormous inland sea, the region as it is now is the result of millions of years of ground-down volcanic matter which was deposited as silt upon the seabed and forms what geologists call the Karoo System. The "Upper Great Karoo" has been intruded by dolerite sills, creating multiple flat topped hills, or "Karoo Koppies", which are iconic of the Great Karoo. GoPro! Be a Hero. So I had to fly it. Category Africa | Karoo. Sunset in Karoo National Park, South Africa. The Karoo (a Khoisan word of uncertain etymology) is a semi-desert region of South Africa.

It has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south. | © Mario Moreno CollectCollect this now for later deloris Tanqa National Park, Karoo, South Africa CollectCollect this now for later april "Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden in Worcester, Western Cape, South Africa Botanicals CollectCollect this now for later MyLittleCornerOfTheWorld This bird is a Lilac Breasted Roller. Common resident found in the dry woodlands in the Okavango regions, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kruger National Park South Africa. CollectCollect this now for later maritza The Karoo South Africa Places and Spaces CollectCollect this now for later esperanza Saguaro National Park is divided into two sections, located near the city of Tucson, Arizona. Established in 1994, the park has 91,442 acres of which 70,905 acres is designated wilderness. Both districts conserve fine tracts of the Sonoran Desert. The park gets its name from the saguaro, a large cactus which is native to the region.

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CollectCollect this now for later longlong Kruger National Park, South Africa Favorites CollectCollect this now for later manuela The Martial Eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus) is a large eagle found in open and semi-open habitats of sub-Saharan Africa. CollectCollect this now for later TomiSchlusz Sunset at the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado CollectCollect this now for later ebony Kruger National Park - South Africa CollectCollect this now for later Eva kruger national park. south africa. Karoo Desert ~ Karoo Desert South Africa ~ Karoo Desert Facts Contact Us! Karoo Desert The Karoo desert is located in South Africa, and rather than being a traditional sand desert, is more of a semi desert with barren landscape covering a plateau that covers much of the country. The Karoo is distinguished by two regions, the northern Great Karoo covering an area of 154440.863 square miles dominated by the Nuweweld Mountains and the southern Little Karoo. It is believed the land area has been in existence for around hundreds of millions of years and up to 270 million years ago was covered by an ice sheet.

<h1>Karoo Desert</h1> However as the ice warmed, the area became home to vast inland seas and swamps that themselves dried out millennia ago. Many fossils of reptiles that roamed the area during this period have been found in the rock strata. Indeed the Karoo Desert is acknowledged as being one of the biggest and most important fossil deposit sites in the world with creatures such as the Pareiasaurus (a hippo-crocodile combo) and the Diictodon being found dating back some 240 million years. This era came to an end when the volcanoes erupted filling the basin with molten lava that extinguished most life forms, and after the cooling, led to the introduction of small mammal life forms and the landscape that is now evident. Today, the desert is home to a few animals including the black rhino, caracal and aardvark, the mountain zebra and Cape and bat-eared foxes. It is estimated that there are around 9000 species of plants in the Great Karoo giving it the widest diversity of desert flora of any desert on Earth.

Although sparsely populated due to its arid nature, there are a number of small communities living inside the Karoo Desert. The oldest and largest such town, Beaufort West, can be traced back to the 1830s and is located close to the Karoo Nature Reserve. One of its claims to fame is that Beaufort West was the birthplace of Doctor Christian Barnard who performed the world's first successful heart transplant operation. Most of these towns supply the vast tracks of land that are used to rear marino sheep and cattle. The Karoo - AfricanSeer.com The Karoo View Comments The Karoo (a Khoisan word of uncertain etymology) is a semi-desert natural region of South Africa. Its inland section, the Nama Karoo, has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south. The western section is the Succulent Karoo, situated in a winter rainfall region near the Atlantic coast.

In geological terms the Karoo Supergroup refers to an extensive and geologically recent (100 to 260 million years old) sequence of sedimentary and igneous rocks, which is flanked to the south by the Cape Supergroup, and to the north by the more ancient Witwatersrand Supergroup. It covers two-thirds of South Africa and extends in places to 8,000 m below the land surface, constituting an immense volume of rocks which was formed, geologically speaking, in a short period of time. Geological history Lystrosaurus The Great Karoo has an area of more than 400,000 square kilometers. From a geological point of view it has been a vast inland basin for most of the past 250 million years. At one stage the area was glaciated and the evidence for this is found in the widely-distributed Dwyka tillite. Later, at various times, there were great inland deltas, seas, lakes or swamps. Enormous deposits of coal formed and these are one of the pillars of the economy of South Africa today.

Ancient reptiles and amphibians prospered in the wet forests and their remains have made the Karoo famous amongst palaeontologists. About 180 million years ago, volcanic activity took place on a titanic scale, which brought an end to a flourishing reptile evolution. The following genera represent some of the extinct animals of the Karoo: Mesosaurus, aquatic Dwyka carnivore Massospondylus, late Triassic to early Jurassic herbivorous, bipedal dinosaur Megazostrodon, early mammal The first Karoo fossils were discovered in 1838 by Scots-born Andrew Geddes Bain at a road cutting near Fort Beaufort. He sent his specimens to the British Museum, where fellow Scotsman Robert Broom recognised the Karoo fossils' mammal-like characteristics in 1897. Modern history The first European settlers who landed in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, began to move inland when the arable land around the Cape became scarce. The Europeans that first settled in the Karoo were the trekboers in the mid 1700s.

Before that time, large herds of antelope, zebra and other large game roamed the grassy flats of the region. The Khoi and Bushmen, last of the southern African Stone Age peoples, wandered far and wide. The Bantu people to the east of the Karoo did not occupy this arid region due to the lack of summer rainfall preventing the farming of cattle. The two ethnic groups mentioned above differed substantially in their cultures and lifestyles; the Hottentots were described as grazers of sheep and cattle, while the Bushmen were hunter-gatherers. (These were the original names given to these tribes by the Dutch. The terms may not be regarded as politically correct today). With the occupation of the region by European settlers, sheep gradually replaced the game and the cover of grass degenerated, owing to changes in the pattern of grazing and in the climate. Starting in the middle years of the 19th century, a railway track was extended into the Karoo from Worcester in the south. This was eventually extended into Bechuanaland, South West Africa, Johannesburg, Rhodesia and far beyond. The impact of this railroad on the history of southern Africa is difficult to exaggerate.

During the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, three Republican commando units, reinforced by the rebels from the Cape Colony, conducted widespread operations throughout the Karoo. Countless skirmishes took place in the region, with the Calvinia magisterial district, in particular, contributing a significant number of fighters to the Republican cause. Fought both conventionally and as a guerrilla struggle over the Karoo's vast expanses, it was a bloody war of attrition wherein both sides used newly developed technologies to their advantage. Numerous abandoned blockhouses can still be seen at strategic locations throughout the Great Karoo; a prime example is located next to the Geelbeks River, 12 kilometres outside the town of Laingsburg. Currently sheep farming is still the economic backbone of the Karoo, with other forms of agriculture established in areas where irrigation is possible. Lately game farms and tourism have also started to make an economic impact. Little Karoo As the name implies, the Little Karoo is the smaller (and more southerly) of the two Karoo sub-regions. Locally it is usually called the Klein Karoo, which is Afrikaans for Little Karoo.

Geographically it is a fertile valley (bounded on the north by the Swartberg, and on the south by the Langeberg and Outeniqua mountains). Although the boundaries of the region are not strictly defined, most people consider the western limit of the Little Karoo to be in the region of Barrydale and the eastern extremity around Uniondale. The main town of the region is Oudtshoorn. Other towns/settlements in the region include Ladismith, Calitzdorp, De Rust,and well-known mission stations such as Zoar, Amalienstein, Barrydale and Dysselsdorp. This area was explored by European settlers in the late 17th century, who encountered Khoisan people living in this rather dry area. Modern farming methods have brought productivity and wealth to this district. Karoo in literature Poet Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem The Dead Drummer: Young Hodge the Drummer never knew - Fresh from his Wessex home - The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.

A blockhouse in the eastern Karoo In Bridge-Guard in the Karroo, Rudyard Kipling evoked the loneliness experienced by blockhouse soldiers at Ketting station on the Dwyka River while guarding the Karoo railway track, a lifeline during the South African War (excerpts): Sudden the desert changes, The raw glare softens and clings, Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges Stand up like the thrones of Kings – We hear the Hottentot herders As the sheep click past to the fold – And the click of the restless girders As the steel contracts in the cold – And the solemn firmament marches, And the hosts of heaven rise Framed through the iron arches – Banded and barred by the ties, ...

Question: The Karoo is a semi-desert region of which country?
Answer: South Africa