Mauritania
- The bazaar in downtown Atar, Mauritania, where you can bargain for everything from handcrafted silver teapots, to watermelons (most of the Sahara desert has been seeded with watermelon ... the seeds remain dormant until the rains come), to arrowheads and glass beads (many thousands of years old, unearthed with the shifting of sand dunes), to meat from a freshly slaughtered goat.
- Mountain cliffs exposing the Atar Group, in east-central Mauritania. The dusty December air is a precurser to the high winds and sandstorms that will arrive in mid-winter.
- Branching columnar columns of Tungussia in the Atar Group. The Atar Group has the highest diversity of stromatolites of any Proterozoic basin in the world.
- One of the more unusual stromatolite forms, Jacutophyton, consists of a central cone surrounded by numerous petal-like branches. This type of stromatolite is found worldwide during the Mesoproterozoic, but is most abundant in the Atar Group.
- Plan view of couple of Jacutophyton, showing the petal-like morphology of the stromatolite branches. It remains unclear why conical stromatolites begin to branch, but branches all initiate at a single stromatolite lamina (i.e., a single time-horizon), suggesting an environmental driving force.
- Colleague Julie Bartley (State University of West Georgia) examining Jacutophyton branching patterns in the Atar Group, Mauritania ... ya' need to look at the rocks - no matter what it takes!
- Across the Sahara, the cooler winter months are used for travelling, so the appearance of nomads with their camels and gear are common sights.
Linda Kah
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
1412 Circle Drive
Knoxville, TN 37996-1410
Phone: (865) 974-6399
Email: lckah@utk.edu