I’m sitting in the Walvis Bay airport, so this is my last post.  I got all  the science done that I needed to do; I hope I come back to this special place some day but science-wise my hypoliths are growing so slowly that I need to wait about ten years.

See you soon in Marin County and Drake High room 414!

So I had to collect some data at my original 2010 Hypolith Array on the Mirabib Road, but nobody was going that way and all the vehicles we had with us were spoken for.  So I wandered up the hill to the Gobabeb Station headquarters and asked if they could help.  Eugene kindly offered me the keys to a Suzuki jeep parked outside.  I kept quiet about my lack of experience driving on the wrong side of the road, shifting gears with my left hand (automatic transmissions are unknown here), or my total ignorance of the use of the 4X4 differential lock!  Also, I had no driving glasses with me.  But, hey what could go wrong?  All I had to do was drive slowly maybe eight miles on a level dirt road with absolutely no other traffic.  So I took the keys and figured out the controls.

The jeep was apparently donated by the Turkish government.  I was alone out there, so of course I took water with me and told Eugene where I was going.  It was great!  Nothing went wrong.  It felt really good to be solitary in the desert after so much togetherness with fifty other scientists.  I found my site, got my data, and was back in little more than an hour.

In the past few days I have had no access to the internet and no time to write until now.  We finished our conference and went camping in the dunes about 20 km south of any road.  Predictably, we had some car trouble but also an awesome sunset.  When we got back the science started.

For the last two days I participated in a west-east transect from the coast to inland sites, collecting soil samples and hypolith samples at points along the way.  In 2012 I had driven along the same road and placed five small sets of “artificial hypoliths” (marble bathroom tiles) to see what grew underneath them.  Now it was time to check.  The western (coastal) two arrays were undisturbed, the farthest west one was well developed, meaning that although the tiles weren’t green yet they had lots of soil strongly adhered to them by polysaccharides (“glue”) secreted by cyanobacteria.  We thing this is the first stage before they turn green.  This site gets a lot of fog, so it’s not surprising that it is the most advanced.

The three inland arrays were all disturbed – the tiles were scattered; not in the positions I left them in.  At one site eleven of the twelve tiles I left there were simply gone – or buried, it’s hard to say.  I think big grazing animals tend to scatter them with their hoofs.  I got some data from what remained, though.

It’s evident that these tiles are getting colonized, but it takes much longer than seven years for the cyanobacteria to grow in fully.  I’ll have to come back some day in a decade or so.

It’s a magical feeling to come to a totally remote spot somewhere in the world and know that you stood there seven years ago!  And to see the proof; something you left on the ground is still there.