Sparkles the blow-up unicorn is helping scientists unravel SA’s fiery history | Business Insider

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Sparkles the blow-up unicorn is helping scientists unravel SA’s fiery history.

,The photograph of Sparkles the inflatable unicorn in Verlorenvlei that was a runner-up in Nature’s #ScientistAtWork competition.

A freeze-corer mounted on the toy produced frozen slabs of sediment that contain evidence about South Africans’ use of fire.It’s not every day that scientists are questioned by police about what they are doing in the middle of one of South Africa’s most threatened natural ecosystems with an inflatable unicorn called Sparkles.

The questions were satisfactorily answered by Sparkles’ owner, Lynne Quick from the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University, and the police left. But Sparkles’ moment of fame wasn’t yet over. “We were really lucky that we had Sparkles there,” says Mosher. “Normally we do freeze-coring off of a boat. But Verlorenvlei is just so shallow right now, and our plan had been to walk out there and basically just stab the freeze-coring device into the sediment manually.

“The idea with the freeze core is we might be able to link it with recent satellite imagery of burned areas, or historical accounts, and try to start calibrating at each site what a fire might have looked like in the past,” says Mosher. “We kind of went into this era of fire suppression, and then more recently people are trying to learn how we can manage landscapes and protect biodiversity in the fynbos but also live with fire.”

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