Other Dunes and Other Sand Deposits - Dune Worlds: How Windblown Sand Shapes Planetary Landscapes - page 97

It may be that an analogous evolution leads to the
somewhat consistent slip face orientation in the giant dunes
in the Badain Jaran desert (Fig. 7.15 ). A classic type of
compound dune is the megabarchan. This is a draa-scale
crescentic form with a large slipface (see Fig. 7.16 ) upon

which many smaller barchanoid forms are superposed.
Although we have tried to emphasize the potential sim-
plicity in decoding superposed dune patterns, even rela-
tively small dunefields (e.g., the Algodones, Fig. 7.17 ) can
exhibit striking complexity.