Qualla: Kalahari Desert

Kalahari Desert: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The name is a warning. Kgalagadi, the Tswana word that gave the Kalahari its name, means "a waterless place" - and a related word, Kgala, translates as "the great thirst." Yet anyone who calls this a true desert has not seen it after the rains. Grasses surge across the dunes, camelthorn trees throw long shadows, and herds of gemsbok move through country that, for eight months of the year, holds no surface water at all. The Kalahari is a paradox written across roughly 900,000 square kilometers of southern Africa: red sand to the horizon, and more living things than a desert has any right to support.

Read more: Kalahari Desert on Qualla

Image: Public domain

Kalahari Desert: The Great Thirst

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olga Ernst & Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stretch a hand into Kalahari sand and it runs through your fingers the color of rust, stained iron-red by the oxides that coat each grain. This is sand sea country, an erg, where ancient dunes have long since stopped moving and settled into low ridges. There are no rivers here th...

Read more: Kalahari Desert on Qualla

Image: Olga Ernst & Hp.Baumeler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kalahari Desert: Not Quite a Desert

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joachim Huber from Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0. Geographers argue about whether the Kalahari deserves the name at all. By the strict definition - low rainfall - much of it qualifies. But a desert is also supposed to be bare, and across most of the Kalahari the ground is too well covered in grass and scrub to count. Only the so...

Read more: Kalahari Desert on Qualla

Image: Joachim Huber from Switzerland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kalahari Desert: A Wetter Past

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JackyR, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was not always this dry. During the late Pleistocene, the Kalahari ran with water. Between roughly 30,000 and 11,000 years ago, fossil evidence from caves in northwestern Botswana records abundant vegetation and standing lakes, with the wettest stretch coming after 17,500 year...

Read more: Kalahari Desert on Qualla

Image: JackyR | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kalahari Desert: The People of the Sand

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Genet, CC BY-SA 3.0. The San have lived in the Kalahari for some 20,000 years, and their knowledge of this land is encyclopedic in a way no map could capture. They learned to read water where there appears to be none, drawing moisture from plant roots and from the wild tsamma melons that grow on and ...

Read more: Kalahari Desert on Qualla

Image: Genet | CC BY-SA 3.0