David Nash
I am Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Brighton. My research focuses upon two main areas: (i) Historical environmental change in southern Africa, and (ii) Terrestrial geochemical sediments (silcrete, calcrete and aeolianite) and landscape change. I use methodologies ranging from archival analysis to field logging, geochemical analysis, and petrological and scanning electron microscopy.
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of life and extensive damage in the greater Durban region and large
areas of the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) coastal zone. Heavy rainfall that
triggered the flooding and mass movement events was reported in
national and international media as having ‘smashed weather
records’. However, no systematic and up-to-date flood record exists
for KZN to allow the April 2022 floods to be viewed within their full
historical context. This study presents an historical geographic
account of flooding in KZN, with a particular focus on the greater
Durban region. The flood record expands upon available databases
held by the South African Weather Service, drawing on missionary
accounts, newspapers and personal diaries to identify all significant
flood events in KZN since the mid-nineteenth century. We document
53 significant flood events from 1850-1899 (average ~1.1 per annum)
and 210 from 1900-2022 (average ~1.7 per annum). Within the limits
of our data, we suggest that the frequency of flooding in Durban has
likely doubled over the last century. Our research confirms that the
April 2022 floods were likely the most catastrophic natural disaster
yet recorded in KZN, in collective terms of lives lost and overall
economic impact.
of life and extensive damage in the greater Durban region and large
areas of the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) coastal zone. Heavy rainfall that
triggered the flooding and mass movement events was reported in
national and international media as having ‘smashed weather
records’. However, no systematic and up-to-date flood record exists
for KZN to allow the April 2022 floods to be viewed within their full
historical context. This study presents an historical geographic
account of flooding in KZN, with a particular focus on the greater
Durban region. The flood record expands upon available databases
held by the South African Weather Service, drawing on missionary
accounts, newspapers and personal diaries to identify all significant
flood events in KZN since the mid-nineteenth century. We document
53 significant flood events from 1850-1899 (average ~1.1 per annum)
and 210 from 1900-2022 (average ~1.7 per annum). Within the limits
of our data, we suggest that the frequency of flooding in Durban has
likely doubled over the last century. Our research confirms that the
April 2022 floods were likely the most catastrophic natural disaster
yet recorded in KZN, in collective terms of lives lost and overall
economic impact.
As part of the project, permission was granted by English Heritage to sample a section from one of three cores drilled through the full thickness of Stone 58 during conservation work in 1958. This core had been returned to the UK from Florida in 2018 by Mr Robert Phillips, an employee of Van Moppes (Diamond Tools) Ltd, Basingstoke, who had been at Stonehenge during the drilling work. Mr Phillips was granted permission by the Ministry of Works to retain the core on behalf of the company and was gifted it by Van Moppes on his retirement to the USA. This core – referred to as the Phillips’ Core – is now held in the English Heritage Collections Store at Temple Cloud (Bath, UK).
The Phillips’ Core is 108cm long, has a 2.5cm diameter and is broken into six pieces ranging in length from 7 to 29cm. The digital materials within this collection result from the analysis of section 2-3 of the core, from 29 to 36cm along its length. Full details of sampling, analytical approaches and interpretation are provided in Nash et al. (2021) (see Metadata)