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20 July 2020 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied
The view from one of the offices in the Marion Island research station, with fresh snowfall in the interior of the island in the background.

Liezel Rudolph, lecturer and researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of the Free State (UFS), is strongly convinced that the Southern Hemisphere’s past glacial cycles will provide valuable insights to help predict and prepare for future climate change. Climate is changing fast and the magnitude of change we have seen over the last 30 years has taken a hundred or several hundred years to occur in the past. 

It is not only temperatures that are rising, but changes in wind patterns, rain cycles, oceanic circulation, etc., are also observed. As we do not know how the earth will respond or adapt to such rapid and drastic changes in climatic patterns, this poses various threats.

Link between landscape responses and climate change

Rudolph focuses her research on reconstructing the past climate of Marion Island. 

She had the wonderful opportunity to visit the island for the past three years with study and project leaders, Profs Werner Nel from the University of Fort Hare and David Hedding from UNISA, she departed on a ship to Marion Island to conduct fieldwork.They published their research findings of fieldwork conducted in 2017 and 2018.  

According to Rudolph, research in Antarctica, the Southern Ocean, and islands such as Marion Island is very important. South Africa is the only African country with research stations that have the ability to explore these regions.

“Marion Island has many landforms that could only have been created by glacial erosional or depositional processes, with glaciers currently absent from the island. To determine when the island was last in a full glacial period, we date the formation ages of these landforms.”

“In the short time we have been visiting the island, it was impossible to notice any drastic changes in the island climate. That is why we use these very old landforms to tell us more about periods before humans visited the island,” she says. 

Rudolph believes that understanding the link between landscape responses and climate change of the past can help to better predict some of the climate change processes that are currently threatening the planet.

“There’s a principle in geography called ‘uniformitarianism’, whereby we assume that the earth-surface processes we observe today, are the same as those that have been active in the past,” says Rudolph.

As scientists, they thus look at evidence of past geomorphic processes (which remain in the landscape in various forms, e.g. residual landforms, stratigraphic sequences, etc.) to piece together what the past climate was like. In the same way, they also use this principle to predict how certain earth processes will change in the future, along with climate changes.

“In return, we understand how the climate and the earth’s surface interact, and we can better predict how the earth will respond to climate change,” Rudolph adds. 

Society to play its part in climate change

In the long run, we as the public should play our part in readying society for the effects of climate change. 

Rudolph says society can play a positive role in terms of climate change by educating themselves with unbiased, scientifically sound information on the true state of climate change and by responding within their own spheres of influence.

“Don’t leave everything up to politicians and policy. As the public, you can start to make progress by assessing the effects that climate change may have on your industry, business or society, and strategise on how to adapt your processes to deal with these changes.”

“Be responsible with our natural resources, reduce your waste, support local businesses that are sustainable, and volunteer at a local environmental protection/clean-up organisation. All the small efforts will eventually add up to substantial change,” she says. 

News Archive

Ghanaian academic speaks about next generation of African scholars
2013-10-08

 

Attending the seminar were from left: Adv Erika Cilliers, Sisa Mlonyeni (both from the Office of the Public Protector), Prof Adomako Ampofo and Prof Heidi Hudson, Head of the Centre for Africa Studies.
Photo: Jerry Mokoroane
08 October 2013

Prof Akosua Adomako Ampofo, one of the Centre for Africa Studies’newly-appointed advisory board members, addressed students and staff on 3 October 2013. Her topic Are you the scholar Africa needs?enthralled the audience with the passionate way in which she argued for nurturing activist-scholars rather than scholars who simply produce knowledge for the sake of it. “It is more urgent than ever before that … we do not simply see our roles as researchers and teachers, but that we are committed to impacting our communities” for the better – also by “making our knowledge production globally visible,” she argued. Africa is said to contribute less than 0.5 percent of the world’s scientific publications. The fact that most of these – and nearly all of the social science production – emanate from just three nations (Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa) means that many countries are absent from the radar.

According to her, the next generation of African scholars will have to compete within a hostile terrain where private universities are proliferating and costs of higher education are on the rise. These scholars will have to possess 22nd century skills, but a 20th century heart and sensitivity for the continent and its people.

Drawing on Kwame Nkrumah, Prof Ampofo proposed three guiding principles for becoming the scholars Africa needs. Firstly, by having a passion for knowledge as well as an Africa-centred knowledge – “nobody can tell our stories better than we can.”. Secondly, to translate our research into outputs not only in the form of internationally-recognised publications, but also in popular sources that will be read by a much wider public. And lastly, to carrying the torch for teaching and learning in the classroom – preparing our students to serve Africa or, as Nkrumah said, producing “devoted men and women with imagination and ideas, who, by their life and actions, can inspire our people to look forward to a great future.”.

Akosua Adomako Ampofo is a Professor of African and Gender Studies, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. An activist-scholar, her current work addresses African knowledge systems; race, ethnicity and identity politics; gender-based expressions of violence; constructions of masculinities; women and work; and popular culture. She is currently co-editing a volume titled, Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender in Africa and the African Diaspora.In 2010, she was awarded the Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Activism Award.


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