Why 97% of Namibia is Empty

[Music] huge country in Southwest Africa and it's one of the most interesting places in the world it's larger than Texas and if you placed it off the coast of the Eastern United States it would roughly stretch from Boston down to Charleston South Carolina and yet it's almost completely uninhabited by people and totally empty just take a look at this global map of human population density and pay close attention to Africa where there's a big empty void of people across the entire southwest corner of the continent Namibia makes up most of that void there's only around two and a half million people who live in this entire country that's about the same size as Western Europe for context that's even less people than live in just the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area in the U.S state of Minnesota this makes Namibia on average the second least densely populated country in the entire world with only about three people per square kilometer of land on average that's a lower population density than either Australia or Canada and it's only just barely a higher density of people than Mongolia the most sparsely populated country in the world but the namibian population pattern just gets weirder and weirder the more you look at it and think about it Mongolia is sparsely populated because it's completely landlocked in the center of Asia between the inhospitable tundra of Siberia and the inhospitable Sands of the Gobi desert and so it kind of makes sense that there aren't really a lot of people there but Namibia isn't landlocked and in fact has the 10th longest coastline on the entire African continent in nearly every country that has a coastline most of their populations live near to the coasts for generally obvious reasons there's just substantial economic benefits to be had by being located near to the ocean which enables people to conduct Maritime trade with the rest of the world grants easy access to fishing and other valuable Maritime resources and grants better opportunities for tourism and Recreation this is why in the 21st century today more than 40 percent of the worldwide human population lives within just 100 kilometers of a coastline and the United States is the perfect example of this Geographic Norm as much as 60 percent of the American population lives within one of the 772 counties that are directly adjacent to a coast in Atlantic Gulf of Mexico Pacific or the Great Lakes which have access to the world's oceans through the St Lawrence River China is very similar where about 60 percent of China's enormous population lives within just these areas nearby to the Pacific coast nearly everywhere you look on this map of where people actually live you see the same pattern of people living nearby to a coastline from South America to Europe across Asia and in Australia there are very few exceptions and perhaps the biggest anomaly of them all is the coast of Namibia which is almost completely abandoned in stark contrast to most of the rest of Africa strangely the coastline of Namibia is actually the most empty part of the country and the vast majority of the few namibians who even exist live hundreds of kilometers away from it deep within the interior around half a Namibia small population just lives in this landlocked area up here in the north immediately across the border from Angola this is the population core of Namibia but despite that the capital in the largest city windhoek is this tiny dot of high density way down here hundreds of kilometers away in the dead center of the country surrounded by basically nothing and nobody in every direction window Wick is a big modern city home to nearly half a million people we're about one in five namibians but it's also the only actual city in the country everywhere else such a scattered remote towns rural communities or literally nothingness for hundreds of kilometers especially along the coastline which is the most remote part of Namibia and one of the most remote places in the entire world and the many reasons why this is the case are fascinating the first thing to understand about the namibian coastline is that it is completely dominated by the narrow Namib Desert from which the namibian country takes its name it stretches for more than 2 000 kilometers from Southern Angola to Northwestern South Africa and across the entire namibian Coastline nobody knows exactly how long this desert has existed here for but there are some estimations that it's been around since at least the dinosaurs roamed the planet making in the Namib the most ancient desert in the world it is also one of the driest and most susceptible to Wild temperature variations certain areas of the desert only manage to receive around two millimeters of precipitation throughout the entire year and temperatures can range anywhere from a stable 48 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit on the coast to 113 Fahrenheit to below freezing just a little ways Inland this makes the Namib the only true desert to exist in southern Africa and also makes it one of the least hospitable locations on the planet and it exists here in this narrow strip along the namibian coastline for a variety of factors the southeasterly trade winds generally blow across the region from the Indian Ocean but they have to first pass over the high slopes of the drakensberg mountains here and in doing so the winds lose a lot of their moisture to the Mountain's Eastern slow the winds will then blow across Africa's greatest escarpment and by the time they reach the Namib the winds are largely hot and dry these hot and dry winds then clash with the cold ocean current in the area known as the benguela current this current forces frigid water from the dark and cold depths of the Southern Atlantic to move up and then flow directly along the coastline of southern Africa which makes the waters just off the coast here significantly colder than they are over in Eastern Africa winds blowing into Namibia from the Atlantic side are therefore generally humid and cold but when they encounter the opposing dry and hot air blowing in from the Indian Ocean the colder and more humid Atlantic winds are forced down beneath them this means that rather than generating rainfall the humid and cold Atlantic winds more often just become dense clouds and fog the nemib desert and therefore the namibian coastline as well is thus one of the foggiest locations on the planet the coast here usually experiences more than 180 days a year of dense fog conditions and that has made the Namib Coastline one of the most dangerous locations in the world for Sailors to travel along for centuries ships that get lost or confused in the fog have been crashing and Wrecking themselves here almost since time immemorial and it's estimated that today there's more than a thousand different shipwrecks from all kinds of different historical eras that litter the foggy namibian Coastline these hundreds of rusting and rotting holes dotted across the coast are why the namibian coastline is often referred to by its other well-known name the skeleton Coast but it's not just the fog that makes the skeleton Cove such a dangerous Hazard to sail across it's also that for the most part there simply just aren't any human settlements nearby to where a lot of the shipwrecks happen at and that means the search and rescue operations have always been logistically challenging to carry out you see part of the other problem with namibia's coastline is that there just aren't really any good natural Harbors to choose from when considering the location to build a port at for the most part the entire Coast is smooth and directly exposed to the furies of the South Atlantic not ideal conditions for places to park your ships at the only two exceptions are across more than 2 000 kilometers of otherwise open Coastline here are at looteritz and walvis Bay which of course are the only real two towns on the entire skeleton Coast exist at but the problem with luderets is that while the area might look like a good natural Harbor at first the water there is shallow and the bottom is full of rocks which makes it not a very good option for large modern day container vessels that essentially leaves just walvis Bay as the only actual usable natural deep water Harbor along the entire skeleton coast and that's why it's namibia's only actual port and the second largest city after the capital with direct Highway and rail access but immediately outside of these two areas the rest of the coast is almost completely uninhabited by anyone and part of the other reason why is just an unbelievable lack of rivers with very little rainfall the entire nimib desert is almost completely Barren of any bodies of water on the surface most of the regions rivers flow underground or dry up for most of the year there's only two rivers that flow through the Namib Desert that occasionally manage to reach the ocean the Omar uru and more importantly the SWA cop that sometimes flows just to the north of windhoek and walvis Bay but the problem with both of these Rivers is that their flows are irregular throughout the year and they're difficult to predict and at some points they'll just be completely dry this makes Agriculture and water sourcing difficult to cross nearly the entirety of Namibia and it's also why only about one percent of namibia's land masses actually considered arable and suitable for farming the only River that's technically in Namibia that manages to flow to the ocean all throughout the year continuously is the Orange River the river that forms the southern border with South Africa but the orange River's big problem is that just 33 kilometers Upstream from its mouth exists a series of Rapids and sand bars which means that it isn't navigable any further into the interior this means that Namibia doesn't have any navigable Rivers at all from the coast through the Namib Desert into the interior and that means that the only way to move goods from the empty Coast to the population centers in the interior is by building out highways or railroads or flying them all of which are more expensive options than simple Maritime transport in a sense even though Namibia has the 10th longest coastline in Africa it's still nearly functions as a completely landlocked country anyway because the Namib Desert and the skeleton Coast act like huge natural barriers between the people in the interior and the ocean and if it weren't for this lucky Sandbar just to the west of walvis bay that makes it a usable Harbor Namibia probably would be almost completely landlocked in practice the nimib desert is therefore one of the most sparsely populated and remote locations on the planet but the fascinating things that people have been drawn to it for the past Century and a half anyway because as it turned out it's also one of the most resource rich areas on the planet as well it All Began back in 1866 when a farmer found a diamond on his farm around here on the base of the Orange River within present-day South Africa the same river that eventually flows into the Atlantic and forms the modern day Southern border of Namibia that Discovery eventually led to a frantic Diamond Rush in the establishment of the Kimberly diamond mine where around 50 000 miners who moved the area spent decades digging out this hole with nothing but their picks and shovels the hole is claimed to be the deepest ever dug in the world by hand and from it the miners extracted more than 2 700 kilograms worth of diamonds for nearly a century the Kimberly mine was considered to be the richest diamond mine ever discovered on the planet and just a few years later after its initial Discovery the German Empire took over modern-day Namibia as a colony and despite its seemingly empty appearance on the surface the Germans were convinced that they could find similarly Rich Diamond deposits somewhere beneath it the German colonists spent decades searching for diamonds in Namibia in years massacring much of the area's indigenous tribes for resisting them like the Nama and Herrero around 80 000 of them were massacred in a period of only four years between 1904 and 1908. events that the modern German government would eventually formally recognize as a genocide more than a century later in 2021 and for which Germany agreed to pay more than 1 billion euros in reparations it turned out in 1908 however that the Germans had been right about their Diamond hunch in the territory all along the Namib Desert was absolutely loaded with diamonds but not in the way that people thought they weren't found underground like they were in Kimberly in South Africa but within the shifting Sands of the Namib deserts dunes and across the beach near the town of luderids as it would later be revealed while the skeleton Coast may be an almost completely Barren Wasteland on the surface its Shoreline is also covered in diamonds the diamonds likely all originated back in the high plateau of Central South Africa hundreds of kilometers to the east but over tens of millions of years of geologic time these diamonds would gradually trickle into the Orange River and flow down into the Atlantic Ocean where the benguela current would take them up and deposit them all along the Namib desert's Coastline or on the shallow ocean floor directly adjacent to it the Germans gradually figured this all out and they transformed Namibia into their Prime Diamond producing Colony right before before World War One began where the South Africans invaded and occupied the whole thing Namibia would be occupied by the apartheid regime in South Africa for the next 75 years and would only achieve total Independence in 1990. thus making it the final country in Africa to ever become an independent nation from the era of colonialism it was relatively easy for the South Africans to occupy and control Namibia because for all of its Geographic reasons I explained there was hardly anybody ever there by 1990 namibia's population was only about 1.4 million people while South Africa's was 37 million white South Africans who ruled and dominated the country throughout the apartheid era still numbered more than 5 million in 1990. three and a half times the entire population of Namibia back then throughout namibia's history of colonial rule millions of carrots worth of diamonds were exported from the country abroad plucked from the beaches near the coast or dredged up from the ocean floor right next to it as of 2021 one Namibia is still the eighth largest producer of diamonds in the world by volume of carrots and the sixth largest producer of Diamonds by Revenue since most of namibia's diamonds are considered higher quality than average but the quantities of diamonds harvested from the Namib Desert are likely to continue increasing the De Beers Corporation the primary company collaborating with the namibian government in the diamond industry today just recently introduced a new ship to their Fleet in March of 2022 called The benguela Gem named after the same benguela current that deposited the millions of diamonds across the namibian coast this ship is the largest undersea Diamond recovery vessel in the world and it cost 420 million dollars to build after its introduction in Namibia its ability to dredge up unprecedented volumes of diamonds from the ocean floor already contributed to namibia's Diamond Harvest increasing by 67 percent in the second quarter of 2022 a rate that if expanded upon could bump the country up into the top 5 Diamond producing states in the world but of course it isn't just diamonds that can be found across the otherwise empty Namib Desert there are strategic resources as well like uranium as it would eventually turn out the Namib Desert also has a lot of uranium the raw seen mine here just 70 kilometers away from the coastline and deep within the otherwise empty desert turned out to be the fifth largest uranium mine ever discovered on the planet and all on its own produces around eight percent of the world's supply of uranium and with multiple other smaller mines Namibia is these days the second largest producer of uranium in the world and uranium is namibia's number one export by a very wide margin the vast majority of which it sells to China and to a lesser extent to France this uranium is the fuel that has powered nuclear plants across both China and France for decades now and its existence has further contributed to the Namib Desert to becoming an Ever more important place on the world stage than it was ever considered to be before but in early 2022 another Earth battering Discovery was made here that will likely change namibia's Destiny importance and population forever into the future Namibia is a country that has literally never produced a single barrel of oil in its entire history but the presence of Rich offshore oil fields and neighboring Angola just to the north Long fueled hunches that there could be similar reserves off the namibian coast as well a 21st century version of The Diamond hunch held by the Germans back in the 19th century shell and the French energy major total each conducted exploration missions for years and never found significant volumes until suddenly in February of 2022 right before the Russians invaded Ukraine they made the discovery of a lifetime in an area known as the orange Basin with a namibia's eez just beyond the mouth of the Orange River they discovered an offshore field that according to some analysts could contain up to 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil that's a a lot of oil and if it's true it would in the blink of an eye suddenly transform Namibia from a country that has never produced any oil at all into being one of the top 20 globally by reserves and the third largest in sub-Saharan Africa roughly On a par with reserves found neighboring Angola whose own production is nearly equivalent to Africa's top number one oil producer Nigeria shell total and Namibia have each announced plans to begin oil production within four years by 2026. and if their production volumes can reach up to near the 1.2 million barrels a day that Angola currently achieves it could become very bad news for countries like Russia who's been attempting to hold the European Union hostage by withdrawing its own energy supplies namibian oil is potentially so vast that it could end up substituting more than half of the entire oil supply that the Russians were exporting to the European Union and it all just suddenly got added to the world's known Supply Namibia may end up becoming invited to join OPEC as a result alongside other oil Rich African States like Angola Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea namibian government officials have projected that this once in a lifetime oil and gas Discovery could end up doubling the entire namibian GDP by as soon as 2040 and create tons of high-paying jobs for namibians but it's not without any controversy owing to its long history of being exploited by outside colonizers right up until the 1990s Namibia is already ranked as the second most economically unequal country on the planet remaining only behind its even more unequal neighbor South Africa the namibian government itself only owns about a 10 stake in projects that involve the nation's plentiful natural resources white namibians only make up around five percent of the country's population and yet they continue to own around 70 percent of all namibia's preciously limited Farmland only about 4 500 people in Namibia descended from European colonists own nearly half of the land in the country in many ways Namibia is still a country dominated and exploited by colonialism and there are well-placed concerns that the massive oil and gas discoveries made last year by European energy companies could only end up further exacerbating those Trends whichever way it ends up playing out Namibia and its small scattered population will without a doubt be one of the most important countries to keep an eye 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Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: arzhTBqTd7I

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023