Professor Frank Eckardt Room 4.06 Tel: 021- 6504117 Email: frank.eckardt@uct.ac.za Qualifications: BSc (London), MSc (Cranfield, UK), DPhil (Oxford)

Academic Profile

Frank Eckardt teaches on a broad range of physical geography topics in EGS 2013 F and GEO 1009 F and currently serves as the Head of the Environmental & Geographical Science Department.

 His research interests centre on earth surface processes, drylands, extreme environments with focus on a variety of remote sensing applications as well as natural and anthropogenic mineral dust.

Recent findings identified major dust soil losses from agricultural areas during the recent Free State drought.

 He was President of the Southern African Association of Geomorphologists (2012-2014)  and is currently President of the International Society of Aeolian Research (2018-2023). He also holds a B-2 rating from the NRF and has supervised graduate projects in the areas of land cover change, applied remote sensing, landscape evolution as well as dryland geomorphology.

 

Frank is the editor of  Landscapes and Landforms of Botswana which is part of a global Springer World Geomorphological Landscapes Series and an MDPI Special Issue on Remote Sensing in Support of Aeolian Research.

 

Notable interests are represented by the following publications and a wide range of regional and international collaborations are evident on Google Scholar.

  

Eckardt, F.D. and Schemenauer, R.S., 1998. Fog water chemistry in the Namib Desert, Namibia. Atmospheric Environment, 32(14-15), pp.2595-2599.

 

Eckardt, F.D. and Spiro, B., 1999. The origin of sulphur in gypsum and dissolved sulphate in the Central Namib Desert, Namibia. Sedimentary Geology, 123(3-4), pp.255-273.

 

Eckardt, F.D. and Kuring, N., 2005. SeaWiFS identifies dust sources in the Namib Desert. International journal of remote sensing, 26(19), pp.4159-4167.

 

Eckardt, F.D., Bryant, R.G., McCulloch, G., Spiro, B. and Wood, W.W., 2008. The hydrochemistry of a semi-arid pan basin case study: Sua Pan, Makgadikgadi, Botswana. Applied Geochemistry, 23(6), pp.1563-1580.

 

Eckardt, F.D., Soderberg, K., Coop, L.J., Muller, A.A., Vickery, K.J., Grandin, R.D., Jack, C., Kapalanga, T.S. and Henschel, J., 2013. The nature of moisture at Gobabeb, in the central Namib Desert. Journal of arid environments, 93, pp.7-19.

 

Eckardt, F.D., Cotterill, F.P., Flügel, T.J., Kahle, B., McFarlane, M. and Rowe, C., 2016. Mapping the surface geomorphology of the Makgadikgadi Rift Zone (MRZ). Quaternary International, 404, pp.115-120.

 

Eckardt, F.D., Bekiswa, S., Von Holdt, J.R., Jack, C., Kuhn, N.J., Mogane, F., Murray, J.E., Ndara, N. and Palmer, A.R., 2020. South Africa’s agricultural dust sources and events from MSG SEVIRI. Aeolian Research, 47, p.100637.

 

Eckardt, F.D., 2022. Geomorphology from Earth orbit 1957–2000. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 58(1), pp.19-30.

 

Eckardt, F.D., Maggs-Kölling, G., Marais, E. and de Jager, P.C., 2022. A Brief Introduction to Hot Desert Environments: Climate, Geomorphology, Habitats, and Soils. In Microbiology of Hot Deserts (pp. 1-36). Springer