Why should you care about the Albertine Rift? The November National Geographic does a spectacular job of explaining

The Albertine Rift extends 920 miles from Lake Albert in the north to Lake Tanganyika in the south. The giant but much shallower Lake Victoria, by the way, isn't a true rift lake at all, though as the National Geographic article explains, its underlying geology explains why the East African Rift splits below Uganda into western and eastern portions. (By all means click to enlarge this map, which this isn't a National Geographic map, by the way. It's from the Woods Hole Research Center's PAWAR project.)


"As the global population soars toward nine billion by 2045, this corner of Africa shows what’s at stake in the decades ahead. The Rift is rich in rainfall, deep lakes, volcanic soil, and biodiversity. It is also one of the most densely populated places on Earth. A desperate competition for land and resources—and between people and wildlife—has erupted here with unspeakable violence. How can the conflict be stopped? Will there be any room left for the wild?"

-- the introductory blurb for the November
National Geographic feature "Rift in Paradise"

"The paradox of the Albertine Rift is that its very richness has led to scarcity. People crowded into this area because of its fertile volcanic soil, its plentiful rainfall, its biodiversity, and its high altitude, which made it inhospitable to mosquitoes and tsetse flies and the diseases they carry. As the population soared, more and more forest was cut down to increase farm and grazing land. Even in the 19th century the paradise that visitors beheld was already racked with a central preoccupation: Is there enough for everyone?"

-- from Robert Draper's main article text

"The Albertine Rift, as writer Robert Draper and photographers Pascal Maitre and Joel Sartore show us in this month’s story, is a landscape shaped by violence -- the convulsions of plate tectonics produced its beautiful lakes, savannas, and mountains. But the overlay of human violence on its geography is unremittingly ugly. The Rift is a malignant tangle of human need and suffering."

-- from Geographic Editor Chris Johns's Editor's Note

"In the [Ugandan] capital city of Kampala, one gets a taste of what the end of the world might look like. Uganda is a country that can sustainably hold 8 to 9 million people. They're at 34 million now, on their way to 80 to 90 million by mid-century. The cars are out of a Mad Max movie. People cook meat in the dark by burning charcoal in tire rims. Mounds of garbage are everywhere. It's filthy, grueling, and crushing."

-- from photographer Joel Sartore's sidebar essay,
"Close Call in Paradise"

by Ken

I've written a number of times about one of my favorite New York City tour leaders, Jack Eichenbaum, with whom I've done tours organized by the Municipal Art Society, the New York Transit Museum, the Queens Historical Society (Jack is the Queens borough historian), as well as tours of his own (notably the more or less day-long "Life on the #7 train"), trying to explain that what sets Jack apart from other tour guides is in part his profession: not "architectual historian" or "urban historian," but urban geographer.

Oh, I know. You're saying, "OMG, this one is going to start yammering now about bleeping geography. There is truly no God."

What can I say? I know Americans hate geography. Almost as much as they hate history, and they only hate history more because they're more often poked and prodded about historical jibberjabber they don't want to know about. Whereas Howie and I have had lifelong fascinations with geography. Not identical fascinations, but fascinations strong and deep enough to be an important underpinning of our bond.

So when I do a walking tour with Jack Eichenbaum, I know I'm not going to get so much about the design of the buildings, as I will from other tour leaders. What I'm likely to get striking insight into is how the development of regions and towns and cities and neighborhoods has been shaped by the configuration of land and water as related to the surrounding area and impacted on by climate and weather. So much of New York City's development, for example, has been strongly influenced by transportation -- as with the arrival and placement -- all geography-influenced -- of trolleys and ferries, and later railroads and subways.

Which is by way of trying to explain why I've been blown away by a spectacular set of features in the November National Georgraphic focusing on a seemingly arcane subject: the Albertine Rift of East Africa. Oh, I've known in a general way about the East African rift system, and with maybe a little prompting I could have explained that it's a major north-south fault system at the juncture of the Nubian and Somali plates (to the west and east, respectively). But in truth I would have been kind of vague about what geographical form this rift system takes -- kind of vague, and wrong.

In my head I've got the phrase "East Africa Rift Valley," and so I always think "valley" -- that the rift takes the form of a valley in the region where the two great plates are pulling apart. And there is a certain amount of valley in the East African Rift system. But there are also substantial mountains and, perhaps most significantly, resource-rich highlands, along with those big lakes, the "Great Lakes of Africa."

This issue of the Geographic includes one of the society's famous "map supplements," a feature that used to excite me but hasn't much for a lot of years now. This one, though, has on one side the best map I've ever seen of the region, and on the other side a host of visual elements that help the reader understand just what goes into making up the region's geography. It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still beginning to digest this material. It actually shows us, not just tells but shows, the four basic kinds of terrain found in the Albertine Rift. Just extraordinary stuff. I'm sorry I couldn't find any of it online to share.

National Geographic caption for this photo by Pascal Maitre: Rule of the gun prevails in North Kivu, a conflict-ravaged province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Mai-Mai Kifuafua, one of many local militias, flaunts its power on a road where it extorts money from villagers and travelers. For almost 20 years near-constant fighting over land, mining riches, and power has terrorized the people.

In addition, before this issue I certainly wouldn't have understood how this underlying geography has set the stage, in the western part of this rift system, known as the Albertine Rift, for a goodly chunk of the worst violence and destruction taking place on the planet in recent decades. The paragraph I've quoted at the top of this post, from Robert Draper's main article, has its stage set by these two paragraphs:

The horrific violence that has occurred in this place -- and continues in lawless eastern Congo despite a 2009 peace accord -- is impossible to understand in simple terms. But there is no doubt that geography has played a role. Erase the borders of Uganda, the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania and you see what unites these disparate political entities: a landscape shaped by the violent forces of shifting plate tectonics. The East African Rift System bisects the horn of Africa -- the Nubian plate to the west moving away from the Somalian plate to the east—before forking down either side of Uganda.

The western rift includes the Virunga and Rwenzori mountain ranges and several of Africa's Great Lakes, where the deep rift has filled with water. Called the Albertine Rift (after Lake Albert), this 920-mile-long geologic crease of highland forests, snowcapped mountains, savannas, chain of lakes, and wetlands is the most fecund and biodiverse region on the African continent, the home of gorillas, okapis, lions, hippos, and elephants, dozens of rare bird and fish species, not to mention a bounty of minerals ranging from gold and tin to the key microchip component known as coltan. In the 19th century European explorers like David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke came here searching for the source of the Nile. They gazed in awe at the profusion of lush vegetation and vast bodies of water, according to the scholar Jean-Pierre Chrétien: "In the heart of black Africa, the Great Lakes literally dazzled the whites."

National Geographic Editor Chris Johns provides this up-front Editor's Note from which I've also quoted up top, which in fact I hadn't read until I was preparing this post:

What began as an attempt to do my job in Africa’s Albertine Rift still haunts me. A lovely young woman carrying firewood on her back was walking through lush forest. My guide, a local schoolteacher, asked the woman if I could take her picture. She readily agreed. Afterward I asked if it was appropriate to reward her graciousness. As I gave her a modest amount of money to make her life a little easier, a man swinging a machete burst out of the forest, screaming that he was her husband. In a drunken rage, he demanded more cash and threatened us. As we began to drive off, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the man beating her. I stopped and ran toward the stricken woman, but my guide pulled me back. He knew the man, he said. The situation could become more violent if I intervened. The man saw us and stopped his assault. They both waved me on. Reluctantly, I returned to my car, furious at the man and with myself, because I felt responsible for what had happened.

Five years later, in 1994, that region was the scene of more violence: the mass murder known as the Rwandan genocide.

The Albertine Rift, as writer Robert Draper and photographers Pascal Maitre and Joel Sartore show us in this month’s story, is a landscape shaped by violence -- the convulsions of plate tectonics produced its beautiful lakes, savannas, and mountains. But the overlay of human violence on its geography is unremittingly ugly. The Rift is a malignant tangle of human need and suffering. For millennia, people have crowded into the region, attracted by its fertile land and minerals. “The paradox,” Draper says, “is that its very richness has led to scarcity,” and in the story you will read why. This dilemma provokes the unshakable worry: Is there enough for everyone? That’s the pervading question in this seventh story in our Seven Billion series on world population.

I think we're all familiar with place names like Rwanda and Burundi, with their recent history of genocidal violence, and of course perennially suffering Uganda (directly to the north of the Albertine Rift, but obviously intimately connected), and the eastern Congo city of Goma, which most of us are probably aware has become a catch basin for the horrific overcrowding and even more horrific violence besetting the region. It has grown from a minor regional outpost to a refugee-swollen dumping ground of 3 million, and to make matters worse, it's poised between two impending natural catastrophes: the already-active (and already-deadly) volcano Nyiragongo and the likely-to-explode vast concentrations of methane in Lake Kivu to the south.

Refugee-gigantized Goma (photo also by Pascal Maitre) is already a human disaster area, without reference to the potentially catastrophic dangers it faces from deadly volcano Nyiragongo and potentially explosive methane-loaded Lake Kivu.

One last point: At a time when the general assumption is that print magazines have no further use, this is a story that can only be told properly in print, with that map supplement at the ready. Good one, National Geographic!

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Will Martian Sheen Save Humanity... Well I Mean Rock Varnish, Not To Be Overly Cute

Bamako is the largest city and capital of Mali and Timbuktu is the most famous place in the country. It wouldn't surprise me if Robert Wexler (D-FL), Howard Berman (D-CA), Brad Miller (D-NC), Gary Ackerman (D-NY) or even Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) or Ron Paul (R-TX), all members of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, could tell me where to stay in Bamako and possibly even Timbuktu. But when I was planning a trip deep into the heart of Mali's inaccessible interior, I knew there was only one member of Congress I could turn to for advice on where to stay in Bangiagara and Sangha: Alan Grayson, who isn't even on Foreign Relations but is the most well-traveled member of Congress and one of the most intellectually curious. (He told me no matter where I stayed in either place to bring my own sheets because there would be no escaping the bed bugs. I took his advice.)

Today I was working out an as yet unwritten post on the history of the Hutus and the Tutsis and I recalled learning that the tall, light-skinned Tutsis had moved south into Hutu country in around 1400 and conquered and enslaved the smaller, darker Hutus (who had arrived 300 years earlier and conquered the even smaller Twa pygmies). The Tutsis were the cattle-owning aristocracy and the Hutus were the food growing peasants. My interest was stoked because Christiane Amanpour did a tear-jerking special on the Rwandan genocide yesterday and my sympathy turned to thoughts about not really feeling very sorry for Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy when I read how they were guillotined. Actually, truth be told, I cheered. Didn't feel much sympathy for the Romanovs either. And if I were to read that a bunch of Wall Street Masters of the Universe went to their Maker prematurely... I don't drink but I might make an exception. This line of thought made me start thinking about one of my favorite scenes in a Hemingway book, the one where the people in a small town lock the abusive, oppressive priests in a church-- long the enforcers for the landed aristocracy in the area-- and set it ablaze. But which book? Which town? And the phone rang. It was Grayson. He wasn't sure either, like me figuring it was probably For Whom The Bell Tolls. But he thought I should stick to using A Tale Of Two Cities for my literary analogy.

But he was eager to tell me that there are alternative theories and I should look into it more thoroughly. I knew he had spent some time in Rwanda and, sure enough, he had been to the Kigali Memorial Center, a museum of the genocide. There, they push the theory that Tutsis and Hutus are one big happy genetic family and that the colonials-- they had Germans and then Belgians there-- had created artificial definitions to play the old divide-and-conquer routine. Obviously, this isn't what the congressman had called to talk to me about.

Nor did he know that I've been worried sick over what I'm reading everyday in Thom Hartmann's latest book, Threshold. It was bad enough last week when I found out all the fish will be gone by 2048 but now I'm in the part of the book about air-- and that doesn't look too promising either. Quoting a startling paper, widely considered the "smoking gun" identifying man with global warming, by James Hansen, the top climate scientist for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hartmann paints a very dismal picture of what kind of world we are creating-- just in case that End of Days fairy tale that nuts like Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence, Virginia Foxx, Trent Franks, Heath Shuler, John Boozman, Randy Forbes, Marsha Blackburn and Zach Wamp are always pushing, somehow doesn't turn out to be reality. Some of the paper sounds technical (meaning it involves arithmetic):

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

You can see why Grayson caught me in a funk. Hartmann rubs it in, by emphasizing that we're "near the point where our use of carbon-based fossil fuels could throw the planet so out of balance that eventually the oceans will heat up to the point that they're uninhabitable for complex current life forms and much of the complex life as we know it will vanish." And some of the stuff Hartmann quotes isn't even that abstract-- like Hansen's conclusion:

Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the ear beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

But Grayson had no way of knowing I was dwelling on any of this stuff. He had just called with some good news, an article he had read in New Scientist that he thought I should take a look at Martian Sheen. It seems to offer a glimmer of hope that if we screw this planet up badly enough, we could just like Michele Bachmann and Dick Cheney and all the conservatives to reap what they've sown and... move the rest of humanity to Mars!

When NASA's Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were looking for signs of life. Instead, all their cameras showed was a dry, dusty-- and entirely barren-- landscape.

Or so it seemed. But what the 1976 Viking mission, and every subsequent one, saw was a scene littered with rocks coated with a dark, highly reflective sheen. That coating looks a lot like a substance known on Earth as "rock varnish," found in arid regions similar to those on Mars. The latest evidence hints that rock varnish is formed by bacteria. Could there be microbes on Mars making such material too?

Rock varnish has long been something of a mystery. It is typically just 1 to 2 micrometres thick, but can take a thousand years or more to grow, making it very hard to discover whether biological or purely chemical processes are responsible. If it is biological, though, the race will be on to discover whether the same thing has happened on Mars-- and whether microbes still live there today.

Future missions will be better equipped for the hunt. The next rover to land on the Red Planet will be NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, due to arrive in 2012. MSL can detect rock varnish, says Roger Wiens, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who will run a new instrument on MSL called a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer. This will fire laser pulses at the rock coatings, and the wavelengths of light emitted as the coating atomises will tell Wiens what elements are present.

NASA is also working with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars programme, which will send two rovers in 2018, in part to hunt for evidence of life on rock surfaces. A subsequent ESA mission, Mars Sample Return-- pencilled in for 2020-- might finally get the definitive answer, as for the first time the mission will bring Mars samples back to Earth.

If the cave varnish and the Mars varnish turn out to be the same as rock varnish, then Mars Sample Return might actually be bringing Martians to Earth.