Sand dunes could serve as Martian windsocks

摘要

Planets come with their own weather vanes: sand dunes. A unique study, which involved watching dunes grow from flat desert, has revealed how winds contribute to their shape. The finding could enable astronomers to determine weather patterns on other worlds, by simply looking at wind-formed sand dunes. Working in the remote Tengger desert of Inner Mongolia in northern China, Clement Narteau of the Global Institute for Physics in Paris, France, and his colleagues used a bulldozer to flatten 160,000 square metres of dunes in 2008. Over the next three-and-a-half years, they watched the dunes rebuild and tracked the accompanying winds.