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Science Tuesday - Walruses, Mars, and Timbuktu
Who Is the Walrus?
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, May 20, 2008
I was about to meet a walrus for the first time in my life, and I felt fabulous. After all, Ronald J. Schusterman of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied them for years, had assured me over the phone that to meet a walrus was to fall in love with walruses — the mammals were that smart, friendly and playful. “They’re pussycats!” he said.
Just as we were entering the walrus house at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, Calif., however, Dr. Schusterman tossed out a bit of advice. “The first thing the walruses will do when they come over is start pushing at you, pressing their heads right into your stomach,” he said. “Don’t let them get away with that. No matter how hard they push, you have to stand your ground.”
I stopped short, confused.
“If you don’t stand your ground, you’ll be knocked over or backed against a wall in no time,” Dr. Schusterman said.
But but ... I sputtered. How was I supposed to stand my ground against an animal the size of a Honda Civic? This sounded less like “friendly and playful” than “aggressive and possibly dangerous.”
“Just push back on the snout with the palm of your hand and blow in its face,” Dr. Schusterman instructed. “A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.”
But suddenly there I was in the pen, time expanding as I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus. Somehow, either out of professional pride or rigid terror, I managed to stay standing and stuck out my palm; when Sivuqaq nuzzled against it, all my fears fell away. I stroked his splendid vibrissae, the stiff, sensitive whiskers that a walrus uses to search for bivalves through the seabed’s dark murk, and that feel like slender tubes of bamboo. Then I blew in his face, and he half-closed his eyes, and I huffed and puffed harder and he leaned into my breath, all the while bleating and grunting and snorting for more.
In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. The walrus belongs to the pinniped suborder, the group of blubbery, fin-footed carnivores that includes seals and sea lions.
But whereas there are 19 species in the family of so-called true seals, and 14 in the family of fur seals and sea lions, the walrus is the only living representative of the family Odobenidae, those that walk with their teeth. And though the walrus is an Arctic species and thus much harder to study in the wild than the elephant seals and sea lions that flop onto the beaches of Northern California, scientists are gathering evidence that Odobenus is the most cognitively and socially sophisticated of all pinnipeds.
“I’ve worked with marine mammals for a long time, and with many different species of pinniped, but I’ve never experienced anything like walruses,” said Colleen Reichmuth of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “They are fantastic.”
Yet she and her colleagues despair for the walrus’s future. Like the polar bear, which last week was granted protection under the Endangered Species Act, the walrus depends on the seasonal rhythms of the polar ice cap for every phase of its life, which means it is particularly vulnerable to the warming of the earth’s climate and the retreat of the ice.
The walrus might well be a match for any famously eggheaded animal of any nonhuman order: for Flipper, for Willy, for Alex the gray parrot, for Kanzi the bonobo chimpanzee. As researchers have lately determined, the walrus shares with other big-brained species an unusually extended childhood. Walrus calves remain with their mothers for several years, compared with several weeks or months for the young of other pinnipeds, and that sustained dependency “could very well provide an opportunity for learning,” said Dr. Reichmuth, particularly about walrus civics.
Evidence suggests that the bonds between walruses are exceptionally strong: the animals share food, come to one another’s aid when under attack and nurse one another’s young, a particularly noteworthy behavior given the cost in energy of synthesizing a pinniped’s calorically rich, fatty milk.
“Walruses are very gregarious, and they like to be near other walruses,” said Chad Jay, who heads the walrus research program for the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. “They like hanging out together, touching each other, socializing. Even when it’s hot and they have plenty of space, they prefer to clamber on top of each other and huddle together.”
Walruses want so much to be with other walruses that if there are no other walruses around, they will make do with the next available large object.
Lee Cooper of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science recounted his 2004 expedition aboard a research vessel in the Bering Strait, when the crew came upon a number of calves that had somehow gotten separated from their mothers, and, oh, how excited the calves were to spot the ship and its staff, and how desperately they sought to climb aboard.
“They see this big red and white ship, they must assume it’s a big iceberg and the people moving around on it are something like walruses,” Dr. Cooper said. Unfortunately, the ship was far from shore and lacked the means to serve as a rescue vessel, Dr. Cooper said, and the staff had no choice but to leave the young walruses behind.
Calves might also need time to learn how to play — music, that is. It turns out that Odobenus is an acoustic genius, its body an all-in-one band. Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts.
Walruses sing with their fleshy and muscular lips, tongues, muzzles and noses. They sing by striking their flippers against their chests to hit their pharyngeal pouches, balloon-like extensions of the trachea that are unique to Odobenus and that also serve as flotation devices.
In full breeding tilt, the bulls sound like a circus, a construction site, a Road Runner cartoon. They whistle, beep, rasp, strum, bark and knock. They make bell tones, jackhammer drills, train-track clatters and the rubber-band boing! of Wile E. Coyote getting bonked on the head. They mix and match their boings, bells and knocks, they speed up and slow down, they vocalize underwater, in the air, at the bubbly border between. They sing nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 10 miles away. They listen to one another, take tips from one another and change their tune as time and taste require.
Nobody yet knows what a female listens for while she hears one or more suitors singing, but listen she apparently does, for she eventually dives from her icy perch and into the water to mate with a well-tempered male, and evidence suggests she will shun anyone who can’t carry a tune. And though females in the wild do not sing as the males do, they have the anatomical chops to make music and will happily perform the entire walrus Billboard chart if given the right incentive — like the promise of food or affection from Leah Coombs, one of the masterly trainers at Six Flags.
Reporting in the December issue of the journal Animal Cognition, Dr. Schusterman and Dr. Reichmuth described their efforts to explore the extent of the walrus’s vocal talents, its capacity to invent acoustical sequences when given the cue.
Experienced trainers worked with two 12-year-old walruses, Sivuqaq the male and a female named Siku (both names are Inuit), reinforcing the mammals’ behaviors by dispensing or withholding food rewards and demanding that the walruses strive ever harder to generate innovative sounds and sound combinations.
The breadth of the walruses’ creativity exceeded all expectations, not only during training sessions but also during downtime. Dr. Reichmuth said one walrus figured out how to use a rubber toy in the pool as an instrument by pressing it against a window and blasting air through it until it sounded like a bugle. Soon two other walruses in the pool had learned to do the same thing.
“To use a tool to produce an innovative sound, and to learn about that behavior socially,” Dr. Reichmuth said, “now that is impressive.”
As impressive as such musical talents may be, and as indispensable as they are to a male walrus’s reproductive prospects, the elaborate infrastructure behind them probably evolved for alimentary rather than artistic reasons. Pinnipeds are thought to be descendants of bear-like terrestrial ancestors that, around 30 million years ago, turned amphibious to better exploit marine prey.
Walruses focused on a particular segment of the seafood market: bivalves like oysters and clams and other invertebrates that live in the benthic zone, the muddy floor below the shallow waters of the continental shelf.
They eat huge numbers of bivalves, maybe 7,000 a day. They creep along the seabed, their whiskery vibrissae probing the surface to feel for the telltale tubes of buried mollusks. They dislodge their prey with a scoop of their flippers, or by sucking in water and blasting it back out in targeted jets. They are able to locate, excavate and extract the meat from an oyster in some six seconds, said Nette Levermann of the University of Copenhagen, “and all this without the help of hands and in total darkness.”
They have such incredible muscular control over their entire snout area, Dr. Reichmuth said, “that if you drop a little piece of fish on the whiskers away from the mouth, they can walk it along the whiskers, across the muzzle and into the mouth.” That precision feeding equipment eventually was recruited to do double duty singing walrus love songs and enabling walrus schmoozes. The walrus’s menu plan helps explain its Arctic range and its ice-based life. Benthic feeders fare best where waters are cold, said Jacqueline M. Grebmeier of the marine biogeochemistry and ecology group at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In cold waters, organic matter like algae tends to fall straight to the bottom to nourish the clams and worms below, rather than getting grazed off the top as it does in more tropical seas. The more trickle-down bounty for bivalves, the more bivalves for walruses.
Ice sheets above these happy hunting grounds in turn offer the walruses a handy platform on which to rest and rear young. The ice also serves as transportation, for as it retreats and advances with the seasons, the walruses above are conveniently delivered to fresh benthic fields.
A walrus is beautifully suited for life on the rink. Its three-inch-thick hide of blubber and skin keeps it warm, while with its elongated pair of canine teeth, its hallmark tusks, the walrus can heave itself from water and onto slippery ice. Through the machinery of eating, then, Odobenus rises: talking the talk, and walking the walk.
I stopped short, confused.
“If you don’t stand your ground, you’ll be knocked over or backed against a wall in no time,” Dr. Schusterman said.
But but ... I sputtered. How was I supposed to stand my ground against an animal the size of a Honda Civic? This sounded less like “friendly and playful” than “aggressive and possibly dangerous.”
“Just push back on the snout with the palm of your hand and blow in its face,” Dr. Schusterman instructed. “A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.”
But suddenly there I was in the pen, time expanding as I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus. Somehow, either out of professional pride or rigid terror, I managed to stay standing and stuck out my palm; when Sivuqaq nuzzled against it, all my fears fell away. I stroked his splendid vibrissae, the stiff, sensitive whiskers that a walrus uses to search for bivalves through the seabed’s dark murk, and that feel like slender tubes of bamboo. Then I blew in his face, and he half-closed his eyes, and I huffed and puffed harder and he leaned into my breath, all the while bleating and grunting and snorting for more.
In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. The walrus belongs to the pinniped suborder, the group of blubbery, fin-footed carnivores that includes seals and sea lions.
But whereas there are 19 species in the family of so-called true seals, and 14 in the family of fur seals and sea lions, the walrus is the only living representative of the family Odobenidae, those that walk with their teeth. And though the walrus is an Arctic species and thus much harder to study in the wild than the elephant seals and sea lions that flop onto the beaches of Northern California, scientists are gathering evidence that Odobenus is the most cognitively and socially sophisticated of all pinnipeds.
“I’ve worked with marine mammals for a long time, and with many different species of pinniped, but I’ve never experienced anything like walruses,” said Colleen Reichmuth of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “They are fantastic.”
Yet she and her colleagues despair for the walrus’s future. Like the polar bear, which last week was granted protection under the Endangered Species Act, the walrus depends on the seasonal rhythms of the polar ice cap for every phase of its life, which means it is particularly vulnerable to the warming of the earth’s climate and the retreat of the ice.
The walrus might well be a match for any famously eggheaded animal of any nonhuman order: for Flipper, for Willy, for Alex the gray parrot, for Kanzi the bonobo chimpanzee. As researchers have lately determined, the walrus shares with other big-brained species an unusually extended childhood. Walrus calves remain with their mothers for several years, compared with several weeks or months for the young of other pinnipeds, and that sustained dependency “could very well provide an opportunity for learning,” said Dr. Reichmuth, particularly about walrus civics.
Evidence suggests that the bonds between walruses are exceptionally strong: the animals share food, come to one another’s aid when under attack and nurse one another’s young, a particularly noteworthy behavior given the cost in energy of synthesizing a pinniped’s calorically rich, fatty milk.
“Walruses are very gregarious, and they like to be near other walruses,” said Chad Jay, who heads the walrus research program for the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. “They like hanging out together, touching each other, socializing. Even when it’s hot and they have plenty of space, they prefer to clamber on top of each other and huddle together.”
Walruses want so much to be with other walruses that if there are no other walruses around, they will make do with the next available large object.
Lee Cooper of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science recounted his 2004 expedition aboard a research vessel in the Bering Strait, when the crew came upon a number of calves that had somehow gotten separated from their mothers, and, oh, how excited the calves were to spot the ship and its staff, and how desperately they sought to climb aboard.
“They see this big red and white ship, they must assume it’s a big iceberg and the people moving around on it are something like walruses,” Dr. Cooper said. Unfortunately, the ship was far from shore and lacked the means to serve as a rescue vessel, Dr. Cooper said, and the staff had no choice but to leave the young walruses behind.
Calves might also need time to learn how to play — music, that is. It turns out that Odobenus is an acoustic genius, its body an all-in-one band. Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts.
Walruses sing with their fleshy and muscular lips, tongues, muzzles and noses. They sing by striking their flippers against their chests to hit their pharyngeal pouches, balloon-like extensions of the trachea that are unique to Odobenus and that also serve as flotation devices.
In full breeding tilt, the bulls sound like a circus, a construction site, a Road Runner cartoon. They whistle, beep, rasp, strum, bark and knock. They make bell tones, jackhammer drills, train-track clatters and the rubber-band boing! of Wile E. Coyote getting bonked on the head. They mix and match their boings, bells and knocks, they speed up and slow down, they vocalize underwater, in the air, at the bubbly border between. They sing nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 10 miles away. They listen to one another, take tips from one another and change their tune as time and taste require.
Nobody yet knows what a female listens for while she hears one or more suitors singing, but listen she apparently does, for she eventually dives from her icy perch and into the water to mate with a well-tempered male, and evidence suggests she will shun anyone who can’t carry a tune. And though females in the wild do not sing as the males do, they have the anatomical chops to make music and will happily perform the entire walrus Billboard chart if given the right incentive — like the promise of food or affection from Leah Coombs, one of the masterly trainers at Six Flags.
Reporting in the December issue of the journal Animal Cognition, Dr. Schusterman and Dr. Reichmuth described their efforts to explore the extent of the walrus’s vocal talents, its capacity to invent acoustical sequences when given the cue.
Experienced trainers worked with two 12-year-old walruses, Sivuqaq the male and a female named Siku (both names are Inuit), reinforcing the mammals’ behaviors by dispensing or withholding food rewards and demanding that the walruses strive ever harder to generate innovative sounds and sound combinations.
The breadth of the walruses’ creativity exceeded all expectations, not only during training sessions but also during downtime. Dr. Reichmuth said one walrus figured out how to use a rubber toy in the pool as an instrument by pressing it against a window and blasting air through it until it sounded like a bugle. Soon two other walruses in the pool had learned to do the same thing.
“To use a tool to produce an innovative sound, and to learn about that behavior socially,” Dr. Reichmuth said, “now that is impressive.”
As impressive as such musical talents may be, and as indispensable as they are to a male walrus’s reproductive prospects, the elaborate infrastructure behind them probably evolved for alimentary rather than artistic reasons. Pinnipeds are thought to be descendants of bear-like terrestrial ancestors that, around 30 million years ago, turned amphibious to better exploit marine prey.
Walruses focused on a particular segment of the seafood market: bivalves like oysters and clams and other invertebrates that live in the benthic zone, the muddy floor below the shallow waters of the continental shelf.
They eat huge numbers of bivalves, maybe 7,000 a day. They creep along the seabed, their whiskery vibrissae probing the surface to feel for the telltale tubes of buried mollusks. They dislodge their prey with a scoop of their flippers, or by sucking in water and blasting it back out in targeted jets. They are able to locate, excavate and extract the meat from an oyster in some six seconds, said Nette Levermann of the University of Copenhagen, “and all this without the help of hands and in total darkness.”
They have such incredible muscular control over their entire snout area, Dr. Reichmuth said, “that if you drop a little piece of fish on the whiskers away from the mouth, they can walk it along the whiskers, across the muzzle and into the mouth.” That precision feeding equipment eventually was recruited to do double duty singing walrus love songs and enabling walrus schmoozes. The walrus’s menu plan helps explain its Arctic range and its ice-based life. Benthic feeders fare best where waters are cold, said Jacqueline M. Grebmeier of the marine biogeochemistry and ecology group at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In cold waters, organic matter like algae tends to fall straight to the bottom to nourish the clams and worms below, rather than getting grazed off the top as it does in more tropical seas. The more trickle-down bounty for bivalves, the more bivalves for walruses.
Ice sheets above these happy hunting grounds in turn offer the walruses a handy platform on which to rest and rear young. The ice also serves as transportation, for as it retreats and advances with the seasons, the walruses above are conveniently delivered to fresh benthic fields.
A walrus is beautifully suited for life on the rink. Its three-inch-thick hide of blubber and skin keeps it warm, while with its elongated pair of canine teeth, its hallmark tusks, the walrus can heave itself from water and onto slippery ice. Through the machinery of eating, then, Odobenus rises: talking the talk, and walking the walk.
Phoenix Lander Is Ready for Risky Descent to Mars
By WARREN E. LEARY, The New York Times, May 20, 2008
To get to the ice, you have to go through the fire.
A spacecraft now completing a nine-month journey from Earth to Mars must survive a fiery, risky descent to the Red Planet to have a chance to scoop up water ice believed buried under an arctic plain.
After traveling 422 million miles since its launching last Aug. 4, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming for a touchdown on Sunday in the unexplored northern regions of Mars. But first, it must survive what its developers call the final “seven minutes of terror” to reach the surface.
“There are many, many risks and uncertainties,” said Dr. Edward Weiler, associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration science division. Since the start of planetary exploration, 55 percent of spacecraft sent to land on Mars have failed, he said.
Although the Phoenix lander, a conglomeration of parts from two earlier failed missions, has been tested and rechecked to correct all known design flaws and potential errors, Dr. Weiler said, “there are always the unknown unknowns.”
If all goes as planned, the lander is to set down on Vastitas Borealis, the arctic planes of Mars roughly equivalent to northern Canada on Earth, about 15 minutes before mission control receives confirmation at 7:53 p.m. Eastern time. The first picture from the spacecraft, expected to be an image of its deployed solar power panels, should arrive about two hours later, mission managers said.
Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that for him the most hair-raising part of the journey will begin about 14 minutes before touchdown, when the spacecraft reaches the beginnings of the thin Mars atmosphere, jettisons the cruise stage that has nurtured it since leaving Earth and experiences three minutes of radio silence as it turns its heat shield toward Mars.
Then, with seven minutes remaining, Phoenix is to plunge into the atmosphere at 12,750 miles an hour, where friction will slow it, heating the shield to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At 8 miles in altitude and 1,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft will deploy its parachute for the next three minutes of descent, when it is to jettison the heat shield, extend its three landing legs and begin using its radar to gather readings on its speed and distance from the surface.
At six-tenths of a mile above the surface and 125 miles an hour, Phoenix is to separate from its parachute and the back shell that holds it and begin the sequential firing of 12 rocket thrusters that slow it to landing at 5 1/2 miles an hour 40 seconds later.
It has been 32 years since NASA, with the twin Viking landers in 1976, has put a craft on the Martian surface using rockets to slow the descent. The last previous attempt was the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, which crashed when its engines cut off prematurely.
The later Mars Pathfinder and the two robot rovers, the Opportunity and the Spirit, which have operated for three years in the equatorial region, landed using air bags to cushion the impact. Mr. Goldstein said air bags were not practical for heavier craft like the Phoenix because the added weight of bigger bags would severely cut into the scientific payload.
Unlike the wheeled rovers, the Mars Phoenix Lander is to stay in one spot and dig for evidence of water and other conditions that could have supported primitive life.
Although there are ample indications that Mars had surface water billions of years ago — in some cases, evidence suggests that water may have flowed in some gullies and channels within the last few millions of years or later — conditions today, including an atmosphere 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, do not allow for liquid water, scientists said. But, instruments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter discovered in 2002 that plentiful water ice lay just beneath the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars.
The target landing area for the Phoenix, surveyed in detail by the high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, is a permafrost region with few rocks or deep slopes that could threaten the lander, said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, chairman of the landing-site working group. “This is one of the least rocky areas on all of Mars,” he said.
Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, the principal scientist for the $420 million mission, said that the area was covered with polar ice in winter, but that the Phoenix was to land in early summer, when the frozen surface is mostly clear and the soil is exposed for study. The 770-pound lander, with a 121-pound science payload, is to spend at least three months examining the surface with a trench-digging robot arm.
The Phoenix is named after the mythical bird that rose from its ashes, because the spacecraft is made up of parts from two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The spacecraft has the skeleton and some instruments from the 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, which remained grounded because of cost overruns, as well as instruments that are based on those aboard the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander.
Dr. Smith said scientists and engineers went through the castoff parts system by system, found almost two dozen potentially fatal flaws that could doom a mission and fixed them. “We re-engineered the spacecraft without rebuilding it,” he said. “We think it’s as good as it can be.”
If the Phoenix survives its landing, it will wait 20 minutes for debris at the site to settle before unfurling two circular solar power arrays that will make its width 18 feet across. Next, two stereoscopic color cameras will rise on a mast that extends seven feet above the surface to record panoramic views of the surroundings. Then a four-foot mast bearing temperature, wind and other sensors is to extend from an onboard weather station supplied by the Canadian Space Agency.
The spacecraft, sterilized to prevent contamination by Earth organisms, is to use its 7.7-foot-long robot arm like a backhoe to dig a series of trenches more than 20 inches into the surface with a movable metal scoop that has sharp prongs on the end to break and scrape expected hard surface, Dr. Smith said.
Using a camera on the end of the scoop, scientists will select samples for detailed study aboard the lander. In one experiment, samples will be dropped into a hopper to feed eight tiny one-use ovens. Each is about a half-inch long and one-eighth inch in diameter.
The sample will be slowly heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to study the transition from solid to liquid to gas, and the vapors analyzed by a mass spectrometer to measure the mass and composition of specific molecules.
This laboratory also contains two microscopes to examine the fine structure of soil and ice samples, scrutinizing features as small as one one-thousandth the width of a human hair that might be evidence of past liquid water on the planet. The Phoenix is designed to operate in the Martian summer, but scientists hope that it survives into at least mid-November. Winter brings months of darkness and no power to protect the spacecraft from a fatal deep freeze before the Sun returns, they said.
“It’s extraordinarily unlikely the vehicle will survive,” said Mr. Goldstein, the project manager. But on the outside chance that spring sunlight recharges the craft next year, he said, it has been programmed with a “Lazarus mode” to signal that it has risen from the dead.
Project Digitizes Works From the Golden Age of Timbuktu
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, May 20, 2008
From Timbuktu to here, to reverse the expression, the written words of the legendary African oasis are being delivered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distributed to scholars worldwide.
These are works of law and history, science and medicine, poetry and theology, relics of Timbuktu’s golden age as a crossroads in Mali for trade in gold, salt and slaves along the southern edge of the Sahara. If the name is now a synonym for mysterious remoteness, the literature attests to Timbuktu’s earlier role as a vibrant intellectual center.
In recent years, thousands of these leather-bound books and fragile manuscripts have been recovered from family archives, private libraries and storerooms. The South African government is financing construction of a library in Timbuktu to house more than 30,000 of the books. Other gifts support renovations of family libraries and projects for preserving, translating and interpreting the documents.
Now, the first five of the rare manuscripts from private libraries have been digitized and made available online (www.aluka.org) to scholars and students. At least 300 are expected to be available online by the end of the year.
The project to collect the digital manuscripts is being organized by Aluka, an international nonprofit company devoted to bringing knowledge from and about Africa to the scholarly world.
In partnership with a consortium of private libraries in Timbuktu and with financing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aluka enlisted media technicians from Northwestern University to design and set up a high-resolution digital photo studio in Timbuktu. A local staff was trained to operate the studio.
Many documents in the graceful Arabic calligraphy are a visual delight. Although the writing is mostly in Arabic, quite a few manuscripts are in vernaculars adapted to the Arabic script, which is sure to pose a challenge for scholars.
“The manuscripts of Timbuktu add great depth to our understanding of Africa’s diverse history and civilizations,” said Rahim S. Rajan, the collection development manager at Aluka.
Researchers have been struck by the range of subjects that attracted Timbuktu’s scholars over several centuries and into the 19th century. Most of the first digitized ones are from the 17th through 19th centuries. The topics include the sciences of astronomy, mathematics and botany; literary arts; Islamic religious practices and thought; proverbs; legal opinions; and historical accounts.
“It is a rich corpus of historical and intellectual literature that is just beginning to become more widely understood and accessible to a broader group of scholars and researchers,” said Mr. Rajan, a specialist in Middle East studies.
In a recent seminar conducted online, members of the Aluka-Northwestern team described some of the problems in starting the digitizing facility in Timbuktu: frequent interruptions of electric power and dust storms fouling delicate electronic components.
“It wasn’t as bad as other places that I’ve seen,” said Harlan Wallach, director of the Advanced Media Production Studio at Northwestern, who has set up similar installations in Asia. “We blew out a lot more transformers and equipment working on a project in China than in Timbuktu.”
While there may be no substitute for seeing the actual manuscripts, Mr. Wallach said, it is better to read them in the digitized form. Many of the pages are so fragile they should not be handled.
Even if Timbuktu today is a dusty, mud-brick shadow of its past renown, living mainly on the few tourists attracted by its name and legend, the pages of its history are emerging from obscurity and, in some cases, are being disseminated by the speed of light.