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The
Kalahari desert (named after the tribal word Khalagari ~
waterless place) isn't a true desert, rather a semi-desert of
reddish sand that covers an area slightly more than a third of a
million square miles covering much of Botswana and extending
into Namibia and South Africa
and as far as Zimbabwe located between the Orange and
Zambezi rivers. The reason it's not classified as a proper desert is that
it receives rainfall (between five inches in the south-west to
twenty inches a year in the north-east of the desert) and is home
to a variety of animals and plants not found in a true desert. It is also home to the San people who live predominately in the north of the Kalahari.
Temperatures range from 20-40 degrees in the summer months to freezing during
the winter period. The
area now known as the Kalahari Desert was formed over sixty
million years ago when the area was a shallow water basin.
Exactly what happened is unknown, however the commonly accepted
theory is that before that time the Okavango, Kwando and Zambezi
rivers followed into a single channel that crossed through
today's Kalahari desert area towards the sea. A few million
years ago, seismic shifts forced much of the land of Botswana
upwards blocking the flow of the channel and creating a superlake
that dried out over thousands of years leaving behind vast
white salt deposits that form part of the desert as we
know it today. The Okavango river remains as the Kalahari's only
permanent river however, as in its history, it no longer
flows into the sea, rather empties into a swamp area
called the Okavango Delta. This
region produces the Hoodia, a plant that is world renowned for
suppressing hunger, and, after eating it, the San people claim
to go
a further 24 hours without feeling any hunger, although there is
no scientific evidence for any claims about Hoodia. There used to be
over a million San living in the Kalahari desert, however that
number is now down to about 2000 following years of persecution
by neighbouring tribes.
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