![]() ![]() ![]() A smaller amount of water is supplied by the Boteti River from the Okavango Delta. The main water source is the Nata River, called Amanzanyama in Zimbabwe, where it rises at Sandown about 37 mi (59.5 km) from Bulawayo. The climate is hot and dry, but with regular annual rains. A dry, salty, clay crust most of the year, the pans are seasonally covered with water and grass, and are then a refuge for birds and animals in this very arid part of the world. In comparison, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is a single salt flat of 4,100 sq mi (10,619.0 km 2), rarely has much water, and is generally claimed to be the world's largest salt pan. The largest individual pan is about 1,900 sq mi (4,921.0 km 2). Lying southeast of the Okavango Delta and surrounded by the Kalahari Desert, Makgadikgadi is technically not a single pan, but many pans with sandy desert in between, the largest being the Sua (Sowa), Ntwetwe and Nxai Pans. Recent studies of human mitochondrial DNA suggest that modern Homo sapiens first began to evolve in this region some 200,000 years ago, when it was a vast, exceptionally fertile area of lakes, rivers, marshes, woodlands and grasslands especially favorable for habitation by evolving hominins and other mammals. ![]() The pan is all that remains of the formerly enormous Lake Makgadikgadi, which once covered an area larger than Switzerland, but dried up tens of thousands of years ago. The Makgadikgadi Pan / m ə ˈ k æ d i ˈ k æ d i/ ( Tswana pronunciation ), a salt pan situated in the middle of the dry savanna of north-eastern Botswana, is one of the largest salt flats in the world. ![]()
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