GRAAFF-REINET NEWS - Earth scientist Stefan Grab will be visiting Graaff-Reinet to speak at the annual general meeting of the Graaff-Reinet Museum that will be conducted at the Old Library in Church Street on 6 July.
Grab studied Geology and Geography at the University of Pietermaritzburg and then pursued a PhD in periglacial geomorphology, studying the impacts of frost-action on rocks and soil high in the Drakensberg.
He joined the University of Witwatersrand as a geomorphology lecturer in 1996.
Over recent years his interests have shifted more strongly into the historical climate and climate change domain. Grab, together with his students and collaborators, has used sediment characteristics to reconstruct high elevation climates of Lesotho, going as far back as the Terminal Pleistocene - 17 000 years ago.
His focus then turned to historical documents – old newspapers, diaries, early missionary letters and reports, early travel logs, etc.
From these, he has engaged in providing detailed annual 19th century climate chronologies for several parts of Southern Africa, including Lesotho, central Namibia, and the Central Karoo.
He is also currently working on establishing an annual climate chronology for Cape Town - 1652 to the present day - based on the day-registers of the Dutch East India Company and early meteorological observations discovered at the Royal Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town. For the Karoo, he has recently used a combination of old farm rainfall records and documentary sources, for example the Graaff-Reinet Advertiser, Grahamstown Journal,
and early travel diaries, to reconstruct the 19th century Karoo climate. His initial focus has been on detailing relative wetness, but his ongoing work aims to also reconstruct a snowfall history and history of particularly devastating weather events, including their consequences on people, agriculture, and the environment.
In so doing, he aims to show that severe weather is not only a current concern but was also of great interest some 150 or more years ago.
Grab's fondness of the Karoo has been growing over recent years. He will be spending time in Graaff-Reinet from 1 to 7 July and would appreciate it if the community can make available personal diaries or documents about weather patterns that he could study.
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