My PhD supervisor, Dick Grove, who has died aged 99, was a physical geographer whose research on long-term environmental change in Africa helped shape understanding of past climate change. At the time of his death Dick was the most senior of the Royal Geographical Society’s 16,000 fellows.
His research between the 1950s and 70s on field expeditions in the Sahel, Tibesti, the Kalahari and the Ethiopian Rift established the scale of climate change on African desert margins. He and his students made cutting-edge use of air photographs to map ancient sand seas around the Sahara and the Kalahari, showing massive desert expansion at the height of the last glaciation (20,000 to 12,500 years ago). Surveys of the fossil shorelines of ancient lakes showed the “greening” of the Sahara in the early Holocene (10,000 to 5,000 years ago).
