Why Dunes Matter - Dune Worlds: How Windblown Sand Shapes Planetary Landscapes - page 240

Part V

Why Dunes Matter

In this final section, we review some areas where the
importance of dunes is demonstrated. While dunes may be
seen by physicists as interesting examples of emergent
systems (see Chap. 20 ) they can be literally a matter of life
and death: Freymann and Krell (2011) describe hundreds of
carcasses of dung beetles, apparently overrun by the hot
dark volcanic sand of a fast-moving barchan, near Olduvai
in Tanzania.
Dunes record a history of conditions, as we have noted in
Part II and elsewhere. In Chap. 21 we review the implica-
tions of dunes for the study of past climates on Earth, Mars
and Titan.
Deserts and dunes are significant in human history,
principally as an obstacle to commerce and military
operations. Indeed, some of the earliest written records
suggest aeolian processes having an impact on civilization;
in his Histories, Herodotus writes:
'On the country of the Nasamonians borders that of the
Psylli, who were swept away under the following circum-
stances. The south-wind had blown for a long time and

dried up all the tanks in which their water was stored. Now
the whole region within the Syrtis is utterly devoid of
springs. Accordingly the Psylli took counsel among them-
selves, and by common consent made war upon the south
wind—so at least the Libyans say, I do but repeat their
words—they went forth and reached the desert; but there
the south wind rose and buried them under heaps of sand:
whereupon, the Psylli being destroyed, their lands passed to
the Nasamonians.'
While perhaps not literally true, the quotation demon-
strates that the association of sand heaps with the wind is
over two millennia old. In Chaps. 22 and 23 we discuss
how moving dunes interact with human infrastructures, and
how humans (and their robot proxies on Mars) have strug-
gled to move across dunes and deserts.
Finally, dunes are a sufficiently evocative landform that
they feature prominently in art and literature, and notably in
our thinking about distant worlds, in science fiction. In
Chap. 24 , we review these fictional dune worlds and how
they have been portrayed.