Late Quaternary palaeohydrological changes in the northern Namib Sand Sea: New chronologies using OSL dating of interdigitated aeolian and water-lain interdune deposits

50,000 years of vegetation and climate change in the southern Namib Desert, Pella, South Africa

“…Chase and Meadows, 2007;Lancaster, 2002), and as a result very little is known about long-term climate and vegetation dynamics surrounding the hyperarid core of southwestern Africa. The arid environment has precluded the preservation of organic material, and most palaeoenvironmental records have been obtained from a diversity of geomorphic features such as dune sediments (Bateman et al, 2003;Blümel et al, 1998;Bristow et al, 2007;Chase and Thomas, 2006;Chase and Thomas, 2007;Eitel et al, 2002;Stokes et al, 1997;Stone and Thomas, 2008;Telfer, 2007;Thomas et al, 1998;Thomas et al, 1997), fluvial deposits (Blumel et al, 2000;Bourke et al, 2003;Eitel et al, 2002;Eitel and Zöller, 1996;Heine, 2004;Heine and Heine, 2002;Heine and Völkel, 2009;Lancaster, 2002;Srivastava et al, 2006;Stone et al, 2010;Vogel, 1982) and fragmentary lacustrine records (Cooke and Heine, 1979;Deacon and Lancaster, 1988;Heine, 1978Heine, , 1982Lancaster, 1979Lancaster, , 1984Lancaster, 1986;Lancaster and Teller, 1988;Teller and Lancaster, 1985;Teller and Lancaster, 1986;Teller et al, 1990;Ward, 1984). Many of these, while being potentially valuable indicators of landscape dynamics (Thomas, 2013), are of debatable palaeoclimatic significance …”

Reply to: “A response to some unwarranted criticisms of single-grain dating” by J.K. Feathers

“…However, this decision tree has been applied to many different depositional environments including fluvial, glacio-fluvial, colluvial, alluvial, coastal and aeolian (e.g. Fuchs and Owen, 2008;Delong and Arnold, 2007;Fattahi et al, 2010;Costas et al, 2012;Stone et al, 2010;Gaar and Preusser, 2012), to determine whether minimum dose modelling is appropriate. Applying this decision process to single-grain dose distributions of colluvial origin is thus fully justified by the documented use in the literature.…”

A prospectus for future geomorphological investigation of the Namib Sand Sea

“…Southern African dune systems are amongst the best dated in the world, yet within this, the Namib Sand Sea is remarkably under-analysed to date with only 38 published ages (Livingstone et al, 2010), compared to over 370 for the Kalahari (Thomas & Burrough, 2013). The few published studies greatly add to histories of overall accumulation (Bubenzer et al, 2007) and climate change (Stone et al, 2010), and when linked to ground penetrating radar surveys of internal dune structures, to models of dune behaviour and migrations (Bristow et al, 2005(Bristow et al, , 2007. Emphasis to date has focussed on the large linear ridges in the Namib, but the diversity of dune patterns present suggests that a strategy to encompass a wider set of forms and subsystems would greatly contribute to debates about sediment throughputs and spatial variability in sand sea development and organisation.…”