Time flies, especially when you’re learning something new. In the case of the ecology module it was more likely to be mosquitoes or bees than flies, but either way we’re all a little shocked that we’re a fifth of the way through the course. Two weeks in the Turkana Basin gone in a flurry of [...]
Just upriver from the Turkana Basin Institute, a revolution is taking place.
The Turkana people are a traditionally pastoralist tribe, moving their livestock and their homes across the arid range in search of fodder and water for their animals.
Because we didn’t get enough time in the sun the previous week, a group of students decided to join Dr. Dino Martins on a hike through the Napadet Hills on our Sunday off from coursework.
The road to ecological disaster is paved with good intentions. Years ago, an aid organization introduced Prosopis to Kenya. The relative of the acacia seemed like the perfect plant to rejuvenate the arid regions of Kenya. It grew quickly in intense heat, thrived in arid soil, renewed forage on rangeland and provided wood for charcoal [...]
At first glance, the Turkana Basin can seem like a desolate place with a pretty simple food web. Looking out over the landscape, there are widely spaced acacias across the sand flats with scrubby, needle-bearing Indigofera shrubs filling in the gaps for hungry herbivores.
After an early morning in Nairobi, everyone boarded a small plane and we flew north up the Great Rift Valley. We watched the green highlands give way to the arid Northwest: our home for the next ten weeks.
For paleontologists and archaeologists it can take a lot of imagination to conjure up the ancient environments that surrounded the animals and artifacts being excavated. Without a clear idea of the environmental context that surrounded the material exhumed from the ground, it’s tough to examine the clues to paleoecological interactions preserved beneath our [...]
After months of anticipation, hundreds of questions and a couple bouts of packing, weighing and re-packing, the Spring 2013 Turkana Basin Field School is finally underway and so is the field blog. Over the next few months, check-in here if you want to know what's going on in the Turkana Basin, what we're learning, and [...]