Driving eastwards through the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado, United States, the Great Sand Dunes emerge at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range in the northeast of the region’s upland plain. The origin story of these great dunes begins during a time of glacial melt, five to three million years ago, when the rivers of the surrounding mountains filled the basin with water and sediments ...[Read More]
Ancient sand dunes exposed off a cliff face on the shoreline of Nova Scotia at the Islands Provincial Park. The juxtaposition of the high angled strata and flat lying layers above revels the drastic change in climate in Nova Scotia’s history; from vast sand dunes to a calm lake system, and presently the western coastline of the Atlantic Ocean. Description by Robert Wu, as it first appeared o ...[Read More]
Snippets of our planet’s ancient past are frozen in rocks around the world. By studying the information locked in formations across the globe, geoscientist unpick the history of Earth. Though the layers in today’s featured image may seem abstract to the untrained eye, Elizaveta Kovaleva (a researcher at the University of the Free State in South Africa) describes how they reveal the secrets of anci ...[Read More]
Coastlines take a battering from stormy seas, gales, windy conditions and every-day wave action. The combined effect of these processes shapes coastal landscapes across the globe. In calm weather, constructive waves deposit materials eroded elsewhere and transported along the coast line via longshore-drift, onto beaches, thus building them up. Terrestrial material, brought to beaches by rivers and ...[Read More]
Imagine taking a hike over soft, ever shifting sands. This is exactly what Martina Klose, a researcher at USDA, did when she captured this beautiful photograph. While most of us will likely think of deserts as inhospitable and static landscapes, they can tell us much about dune forming processes, as Martina explains in today’s blog post. The photograph shows the view down from the crest of a megad ...[Read More]
This picture shows a Quaternary aeolianite fossil dune at the Escullos beach, in the Nature Reserve of Cabo de Gata (Almeria, Spain). Originally a soft accumulation of sand grains, shaped by the wind into large mounds and ridges, the dunes eventually turn into rock. As the sediments compact under their own pressure and expel any moisture and fluids retained within them, they become lithified and b ...[Read More]