Central Karoo

In South Africa’s central Karoo desert, an international team is building the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope whose thousands of dishes will be shared by Australia and Africa.

South Africa's cabinet proposed new regulations to govern exploration for shale gas late last year after it lifted a 2012 moratorium on the activity in the central Karoo region.

“The government is under a great deal of pressure to hurry up,” said Hein Rust, director of disaster management for the central Karoo region.

Its bounds begin immediately to the eastward of the rugged mountain chain which runs parallel with the coast-line, about eighty miles inland, and it stretches on for hundreds of miles until merged with the central Karoo plains.