DESTINATION WILDERNESS - AFRICA, BLUE GOLD BENEATH THE SANDS
Embark on five thrilling adventures into the wild and explore the most extraordinary landscapes as you are led though water, ice, rocks and fire alongside...
Embark on five thrilling adventures into the wild and explore the most extraordinary landscapes as you are led though water, ice, rocks and fire alongside expedition leader and great undersea explorer Francis Le Guen and his team. "Over the course of our travels, we’ve explored many oceans... This time I take you on a voyage whose inner dimension is twofold, a fascinating journey as we delve into perhaps the most mysterious of them all; an ocean that doesn’t yet exist but is in the throes of its birth; a hidden ocean which geological convulsions in Africa are creating before our very eyes! We head off for the land of extremes... " A huge geological fracture cuts across the northeast of Africa forming the Rift Valley. But the fault stretches further south, from Tanganyika to Malawi. Lake Malawi in fact is the starting point of our expedition. In the green waters, it is no mere cliff that the divers swim along, but the underwater portion of the Great Rift fault, 50 Km wide and several thousand meters deep. Lake Malawi is one of the world’s oldest freshwater reserves, thanks to an underground river that’s been flowing into it for nearly a million years. This lake - the third largest in Africa - continues to grow by 10mm each year. In several million years, it will join with the Indian Ocean. Does the fault really end in the heart of this enormous lake? Where do these chasms lead, which may one day swallow up the lake in a gigantic waterfall? The answer may be found at the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe where the Zambezi River offers an extraordinary natural phenomenon: Victoria Falls. The water plummets 170 meters down where it seems to disappear in the bowels of a rugged land. Here, the Rift splits into two branches: one that continues south and the other that veers west towards Botswana and the Okavango River. It’s the only river in the world that doesn’t flow into the sea, forming a delta where the water evaporates on the fringes of the Kalahari. But the water doesn’t simply disappear into the atmosphere... Could it sink below the desert sands?... Perhaps we’ll find the answer in Namibia, where the fault that passes beneath the delta continues. Across the Botswanian border, the crew encounters some Bushmen. They belong to the San ethnic group, the oldest people in Africa. They’re the only population to survive in the desert where it rains just once a year! But the San know where to find water beneath the sands, the precious "blue gold" that is nevertheless so abundant just a few hundred kilometers off in Lake Guinas on the edge of the Kalahari desert. The giant chasm - over 120 meters deep - awaits the divers. Formed when the limestone ceiling of a cave collapsed, it’s just the visible part of a network of underwater galleries that run through the depths. Amidst the schools of fish, the divers discover stalactites, metallic lodes exposed by the acidic water. The underwater walls shine in the light of the diving lamps; they seem covered in a coat of precious metal, while the exterior of the chasm is made of limestone. It’s a dive into a whole different world. Nothing here looks like anything we’ve ever seen before. Who knows what secrets the rift has in store deep below the African sands. The cradle of mankind may have a completely different look in a few million years when a new Mediterranean is born in its midst.
