Science Up Front

Pieter Vermeesch on the Ancient Sands of the Namib Desert

The Namib Sand Sea sweeps along the west coast of Africa, its sands sculpted into arcing dunes stretching to heights of 250 meters. On the surface, the sands of these massive mounds seem as though they are in constant motion, pushed and scattered by wind, carried away on streams of air, and replaced by new sands. But a study by Pieter Vermeesch, a researcher at Birkbeck University, London, has drawn attention to sands of a very different character in the Namib—sands that have lain immobile, buried in dunes, for the last one million years.

The new findings, published in Nature Geoscience, overturn the notion that in the last several hundred thousand years the sand sea might have been washed clean and then filled in again by new sands as a result of rapid glacial and interglacial climate change. “Our data prove that, at no point during the past million years, was the area currently occupied by the Namib Sand Sea entirely cleared of sand,” Vermeesch said.

Wind sweeping over the dunes of the Namib Sand Sea, situated on the west coast of Africa. (Photo by Pieter Vermeesch)

The Namib Sand Sea, which forms the central dune region of the wider Namib desert, is an ideal “natural laboratory” for measuring the time of sand residence. “It is a relatively simple desert,” Vermeesch explained. “Atmospheric circulation in this part of the world is dominated by the southeasterly trade winds, so sand transport is largely unidirectional.” In addition, because the Namib’s sand originated primarily from a single source—the catchment of the Orange River, one of Africa’s longest rivers and located at the southern edge of the desert—its sediment system is fairly uncomplicated.

Vermeesch estimated the age of the Namib’s sediment by looking at the radioactive decay of isotopes known as cosmogenic nuclides in sediments of the Orange River catchment and in the sand sea. Cosmogenic nuclides, examples of which include beryllium-10 and aluminium-26, are produced by the reaction of cosmic rays, which travel from space and pass through Earth’s atmosphere, with elements such as silicon, oxygen, and iron in rock and soil. Through nuclide detection Vermeesch discovered that sediments become increasingly younger toward the north of the desert.

The Namib Sand Sea. (Photo by Pieter Vermeesch)

The age distribution of the actual sand grains in the Namib’s dunes was mapped with a technique known as U-Th-Pb dating, or uranium-thorium-lead dating. “The sand contains less than one part per thousand of the mineral zircon (zirconium silicate),” Vermeesch pointed out. “Zircon is found in many common rocks, including those of the Orange River catchment, and contains up to a percent of radioactive uranium and thorium, which decay to different isotopes of lead.”

Vermeesch explained that U-Th-Pb dating is a very precise method for measuring the crystallization age of zircon-bearing rocks. “The U-Pb age distribution obtained by dating 100 zircon grains can be used as a characteristic fingerprint of sand samples,” he said. Comparison of sand fingerprints from dunes in different areas of the Namib to those from rocks and sands of the Orange River and surrounding catchment paralleled the data from the cosmogenic nuclides, thereby confirming the site of origin and dispersal of sand across the Namib. The research also uncovered the actual age of the dune sands—one million years—making them far older than was previously believed.

Whether other deserts have such long-term resident sands is unclear. “Previous studies using a different dating technique, called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), have indicated that some individual dunes contain sand that is tens to hundreds of thousands of years old,” Vermeesch said. “But our research is the first to study the average residence time of an entire sand sea, so we do not yet know how the Namib compares to other deserts.”

The aeolian dunes of the Namib Sand Sea. (Photo by Pieter Vermeesch)

The findings also provide important insights into the paleoclimate of the Namib Sand Sea. “The residence time of sand grains in a sand sea is a proxy for the sensitivity of desert areas to climate change,” Vermeesch explained. “There is compelling evidence that aridity in southwest Africa is a very long-lived feature. The longevity of aeolian processes (wind-caused dune formation) in the Namib desert, however, has hitherto been largely unknown.”

Vermeesch and colleagues now plan to investigate competing explanations for the long residence time of sand in Namib’s dunes. “Either the desert is in a steady state, and dunes have been constantly on the move during the past million years, or sand entered the desert one million years ago, was subsequently fixed by vegetation, and was re-mobilized more recently,” he said. “To distinguish between these two models, further samples are needed from the heart of the sand sea.”

Vermeesch also intends to apply the zircon uranium-lead sand-tracing technique to the sand seas of the Sahara. “Very little is known about those deserts, where their sand comes from, and the degree of communication between them,” he added.