The Riddle Of The Sands

Much of our coastline is edged by sand dunes, running like a ribbon between land and sea. Antony Woodward explores this shifting wilderness.

- Antony Woodward

There is something alien and slightly creepy about sand dunes. Those seamless curves sweeping to snaking, sword-like seifs; the hellenistic six-pack ripples; the way the anastomosing patterns divide and reconnect, like blood vessels, river channels, leaf veins, as if by some grand design. This eerie beauty is compounded by our familiarity with wind-sculpted design— in planes, cars, locomotives, architecture. This is where it started, dunes seem to proclaim, this is where it will end.

‘The observer never fails to be amazed,’ wrote the great desert explorer r. A. Bagnold in the introduction to his The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (1941), of the way dunes grow and move, ‘retaining their shape, even breeding,in a manner which, by its grotesque imitation of life, is vaguely disturbing to an imaginative mind.’

Most of what we know about aeolian dynamics still comes from Brigadier Bagnold’s studies. his was the book NASA consulted when the first photographs of dunes on Mars appeared in 1989. One of the ‘sunburned, exhausted men’ described by Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient, who presented their findings to the royal Geographical Society following the great decade of Libyan Desert expeditions that closed with the Second World War, it was Bagnold who discovered that sand moves chiefly by jumping or ‘saltation’, a process whereby particles skip along like a bouncing ball, knocking into other particles and causing them, in turn, to ‘creep’.