Crossword clues for karoo
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Karroo \Kar*roo"\ (k[.a]r*r[=oo]"), n.; pl. Karroos (k[.a]r*r[=oo]z"). One of the dry table-lands of South Africa, which often rise terracelike to considerable elevations. [Also karoo.]
The Great Karroo, or The Karroo, a vast plateau, in Cape Colony, stretching through five degrees of longitude, at an elevation of about 3,000 feet.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"barren table land in South Africa," 1789, said to be from a Hottentot word.
Wiktionary
n. Any vast prairie bordering a desert.
Wikipedia
The Karoo ( ; from a Khoikhoi word, possibly garo "desert") is a semi- desert natural region of South Africa. There is no exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo, and therefore its extent is also not precisely defined. The Karoo is partly defined by its topography, geology, and climate — above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold. The Karoo also hosted a well-preserved ecosystem hundreds of million years ago which is now represented by many fossils.
The Karoo formed an almost impenetrable barrier to the interior from Cape Town, and the early adventurers, explorers, hunters and travelers on the way to the Highveld unanimously denounced it as a frightening place of great heat, great frosts, great floods and great droughts. Today it is still a place of great heat and frosts, and an annual rainfall of between 50–250 mm, though on some of the mountains it can be 250–500 mm higher than on the plains. However, underground water is found throughout the Karoo, which can be tapped by boreholes, making permanent settlements and sheep farming possible.
The xerophytic vegetation consists of aloes, mesembryanthemums, crassulas, euphorbias, stapelias, and desert ephemerals, spaced 50 cm or more apart, and becoming very sparse going northwards into Bushmanland and, from there, into the Kalahari Desert. The driest region of the Karoo, however, is its southwestern corner, between the Great Escarpment and the Cederberg-Skurweberg mountain ranges, called the Tankwa Karoo, which receives only 75 mm of rain annually. The eastern and north-eastern Karoo are often covered by large patches of grassland. The typical Karoo vegetation used to support large game, sometimes in vast herds.
Today sheep thrive on the xerophytes, though each sheep requires about 4 hectares of grazing to sustain itself.
The Karoo is a semi-desert region of South Africa.
Karoo may also refer to:
In earth sciences:
- Karoo-Ferrar, a major geologic province which mostly covers South Africa and Antarctica
- Karoo Supergroup, a stratigraphic unit in sub-Saharan Africa
- Karoo Ice Age, the second major ice age of the Phanerozoic Eon
In Astronomy:
- Karoo (crater), an impact crater on Asteroid 253 Mathilde
Places:
- Karoo National Park, in the Western Cape, South Africa
- Karoo District Municipality, in the Northern Cape, South Africa
- Central Karoo District Municipality, in the Western Cape, South Africa
- Karoo Hoogland Local Municipality, in the Northern Cape, South Africa
Birds
- Karoo chat
- Karoo eremomela
- Karoo korhaan
- Karoo prinia
- Karoo scrub robin
Companies
- Karoo (internet service provider), an Internet Service Provider in the United Kingdom
Literature
- Saul Karoo, main character and narrator in Karoo, posthumous novel by Steve Tesich, published in 1998.
Karoo is an impact crater on the Asteroid 253 Mathilde Named for the Great Karoo Basin, a Coal Basin in South Africa. It is 33.4 kilometers in diameter and was the most prominent crater seen during NEAR Shoemaker's Flyby of the Asteroid.
Usage examples of "karoo".
With it she had shot snipe in the Okavango Delta, sand grouse in the Karoo, duck and geese on the great Zambezi, grouse on the highland moors, and pheasant, woodcock and partridge on some of the great English estates to which she and the ambassador had been invited.
They transported her back to the open horizons of the great Karoo, for there were the same lion-coloured earth and sepia rockscapes.
The Plains of Camdeboo and she had begun to understand just what a wondrous world the Karoo really was.
Anything over four inches of rainfall in the Karoo was considered a good year, and in such a season the springbok ewes lambed twice.
They sipped their champagne and laughed and chatted and flirted, while a flamboyant Karoo sunset lit the gaunt kopies with a ruddy glow and set the clouds on fire.
He knew what the Karoo was now, even if he had not seen a Boer roll over like a rabbit, or heard the whine of flying bullets.
II Young Hodge the Drummer never knew - Fresh from his Wessex home - The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.
They transported her back to the 63 open horizons of the great Karoo, for there were the same lion-coloured earth and sepia rockscapes.
But they built themselves houses, and they supplied the Dutch East India Company with food and water, gradually budding off little townlets, Wynberg, Stellenbosch, and pushing their settlements up the long slopes which lead to that great central plateau which extends for fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Karoo to the Valley of the Zambesi.
On crossing the railroad De Wet turned furiously upon his pursuers, and, taking an excellent position upon a line of kopjes rising out of the huge expanse of the Karoo, he fought a stubborn rearguard action in order to give time for his convoy to get ahead.
It was also mentioned that though the Boers evacuated the barren and unprofitable desert of the Karoo, the Eastern bands which had come with Kritzinger did not follow the same course, but continued to infest the mountainous districts of the Central Colony, whence they struck again and again at the railway lines, the small towns, British patrols, or any other quarry which was within their reach and strength.
Mines, and beyond that slope begins the waterless desert, covered with a species of karoo shrub.
But to my mind the chances of our finding it in that great sea of sand and karoo scrub seemed almost infinitesimal.
So far as the eye might reach there was nothing but arid sweltering sand and karoo scrub.
The largest of these animals included an armor-plated giant ten feet long and three wide, whose only remaining legacy is a set of fossilized footprints in the Karoo, South Africa.