Flood
| This section's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. |
If one thinks of the channels in the delta as the arteries of this gigantic living organism, then its heart is 1 250 km away in the Angola highlands. This distant heart beats but once a year when Angola receives three times the amount of rainfall that Botswana does, sending a giant pulse of water coursing across Africa which eventually drains its lifeblood into the waiting arteries of the Okavango. This is referred to as the flood but unlike in the rest of the world where a flood has negative connotations, in the Okavango the flood is always welcome.
Although the summer rains fall in Angola in January, they take a whole month to travel the first 1,000 km of the Okavango River. And then they take a further four months to filter through the plants and numerous channels of the final 250 km of the Delta. As a result the flood is at its biggest sometime between June and August, during Botswana’s dry winter months. And the delta swells to three times its permanent size, attracting animals from miles around and creating one of Africa’s greatest concentrations of wildlife.
At its widest point in a big flood year the seasonal swamp stretches to 150 km across from east to west. And one of the factors that leads to the ever changing nature of the Delta is the flatness of the area. To give an idea of how flat it is, if one were to take a cross section of the Delta at its widest point, along this cross section one would find that the height variation from the mean over that 150 km is less than 2m. So a little sand deposition can cause major changes.
Read more about this topic: Okavango River
Famous quotes containing the word flood:
“Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have “really happened,” or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)
“So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Men hold themselves cheap and vile; and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)