Dear Eos:
A 4 a.m. start was a small price to pay for the rare opportunity to access the extraordinary landscape of Etosha Pan, Namibia, before sunrise. Colleagues and I walked several kilometers pushing a portable wind tunnel mounted on a field buggy to reach our study sites before the desert heat took hold. The measurements collected that morning underpin our new study of dust emission from Etosha Pan, revealing how the pan’s evolving surface influences when dust is released into the atmosphere.
Fieldwork asks much of those who do it, but experiences like this are among its greatest rewards. I thank my colleagues Giles Wiggs and Rosemary Huck from the University of Oxford and Johannes Pitji and Claudine Cloete from the Etosha Ecological Institute, whose support and expertise made this work possible, as well as my other coauthors and collaborators.
—Natasha Wallum, University of Oxford