yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Surveying The Angolan Highlands | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

We were expecting a river here and we didn’t find one. In 2015, a group of scientists began a comprehensive survey of the little known Angolan highlands. The plan was to travel thousands of kilometers down river from the source lakes to Botswana’s Okavango Delta to learn more about this critical ecosystem. Just days after launching canoes from the lake, the team found only a small stream – not enough to float their 400 kilogram boats.

But there are no other options. There is no vehicle. Drop-off point. There is no other way for us to get to the water we can use. But an almost expedition-ending problem became an important scientific discovery. The soggy terrain the team was dragging its boats across wasn’t blocking the river from its source; it was bridging it. They were trekking across peat – a rich soil made up of partially decaying vegetation, able to hold ten times its weight in water.

Like a 1,600-square-kilometer sponge, these peat deposits are filtering and feeding pristine water into the Okavango. This steady release ensures that even in drier years, the water keeps flowing. One, two, three. On the water. Yay! Since then, the team has conducted more in-depth studies of the peat. C'mon. C'mon. Yes!

Years of collecting samples and radiocarbon dating have revealed that for thousands of years this living landscape has been absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to mitigate the global effects of climate change. Thousands of tons of carbon are being sequestered by the Angolan highlands each year. But they’ve also discovered that these critical peat ecosystems are threatened by human impacts like fires and encroaching agriculture.

We’ve only begun to understand these peatlands. National Geographic and De Beers’ Okavango Eternal partnership is supporting PhD researchers to study and map the area. Providing evidence about why and how to protect these peatlands; the biodiversity they support, and the water and carbon they regulate. Okavango Eternal will use these findings to inform the creation of conserved areas, which are supported by local communities. Not only helping to protect the peatlands and the rest of the Okavango Basin, but also creating sustainable livelihood opportunities for the people who rely on it.

More Articles

View All
How a young Bill Clinton made waves during his presidential campaign | Rewind the '90s
(Crowd cheering) NARRATOR: It’s 1992, President George H.W. Bush is up for re-election. With a squeaky clean image, he’s had some of the highest approval ratings of any president. Then, a political bad boy joins the race. (Jazzy saxophone music) AJ BENZ…
Capturing the Year in an Instant | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Uh, the fire is approaching. It’s making this really loud wind, uh, sort of howling. You can hear the fire coming over the ridge line. Uh, just in the last 20 minutes it has become visible, so it jumped the ridge and is getting closer. That’s National Ge…
Chef Crystal Wahpepah puts Indigenous foods on the map | Queens | National Geographic
National Geographics Queens celebrates powerful female leaders in the natural world, and behind every inspirational animal on screen is an equally gritty and determined woman. All the women on this Queen’s Journey are true leaders: fierce, smart, resilien…
4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour
Earth is 4.5 billion years old – impossible for your brain to truly grasp, so here is an experiment: every second, around 1.5 million years will pass – you’re on a musical train ride looking out the window, passing all of Earth’s history in an hour. Watch…
The 2022 Everything Bubble Is About To Pop
What’s up Grandma? It’s guys here, so we did it! If you stayed invested in the markets throughout the last year and not panic sold, you would have been up another 28% without doing a single thing. Or basically, you’d just be break even after inflation. Ju…
The Market Revolution - part 2
So we’ve been talking about the market revolution in the United States, which was this period in the first half of the 19th century where the way that Americans did business really changed. It changed in a number of ways. The kinds of work that people did…