JOURNAL ARTICLE
Booming Sand
Franco Nori, Paul Sholtz and Michael Bretz
Scientific American
Vol. 277, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 1997), pp. 84-89
Published by: Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24995915
Page Count: 6
BOOMING OF A DUNE occurs after a number ofevents have set up the right conditions—clean, dry, polished and rounded grainsof sand near the top of a dune. After itis steeper than a critical angle of 34degrees, the dune avalanches. Upper layers of sand move faster than lowerlayers (a), rising and settling down repeatedly between the grains (b–d). Theconcerted up-and-down motion is believed to cause the booming.
Similar sizes do not alone allow sand to boom. On the contrary, the booming sands of Korizo and Gelf Kebib, also in Libya, feature an uncharacteristically broad range of particle sizes. Moreover, silent dune sand often contains grains somewhat similar to nearby booming sand.
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