I don't think Jim Denevan need lose any sleep over possible competition, but this is fun! From New Scientist: No, it's not alien art. A robotic beach artist has created giant drawings in the sand. Developed by Paul Beardsley from...
What, you might reasonably ask, is this image? This is, after all, a blog about topics arenaceous, and folded paper ornaments would, while somewhat seasonal, hardly seem relevant. But a couple of explanations: first, ever since I was a kid...
“It would take more Planck lengths to span a grain of sand than it would take grains of sand to span the observable universe.” Geologists tend to pride themselves on their grasp of scale, and, of course, I enjoy the...
Between sleeping and awakening. We tend to think of the world’s dune fields as fearsomely awake, threatening and encroaching, creating vast sand and dust storms – and this is indeed the case for great stretches of our planet’s sand seas,...
Via Geoff Manaugh at BLDBLOG and the US Military, a spectacular digital/analog sandbox! Yes, it's developed for war games and military planning and operations, but wow, does it look like fun. The digital dimensions are powered by Microsoft's X-box Kinect...
"Since October 1998, the American Geosciences Institute has organized this national and international event to help the public gain a better understanding and appreciation for the Earth Sciences and to encourage stewardship of the Earth. This year's Earth Science Week...
We are all familiar with the endless (and expensive) foolishness of ‘beach nourishment’, of the idiocy of Dubai’s artificial sand islands and the general ravages of ‘sand wars’ around the world, but now it seems that sand-shifting is taking on...
These images are from the November 1968 edition of the now sadly defunct Desert Magazine, a special on Death Valley. The “Riddle of the Racetrack” refers to the enduring mystery of the “sailing stones” of Racetrack Playa, the remote dry...
In his classic and wonderful book Desert Solitaire, the original eco-warrior, Edward Abbey, described the landscapes of Utah’s Arches National Monument: … here all is exposed and naked, dominated by the monolithic formations of sandstone which stand above the ground...
One of the problems with writing a book that tries to describe the current state of any science is that, by the time the book is published, the current state will have moved on and there’s always something new and...
Stevenage: for readers outside of the UK it may not ring much of a bell, and indeed, with no disrespect to Stevenagians, for most UK readers it is not one of our most famous and glamorous metropolitan areas. Located around...
Being still in the throes of editing and correcting the proofs for the new book (with the exception of compiling the index, the least enjoyable part of the whole process), I am particularly paranoid about fact-checking. I have one important...
Serendipity is a wonderful thing, and I was surprised and delighted to find, completely by accident while looking for something else, this document, published back in March: In the acknowledgment section, the following appears: The idea for this publication came...
Three years ago we embarked in Bali and headed eastward, across the Wallace Line, and island-hopped for a while around the archipelago of Nusa Tenggara. We sailed past the great volcanic edifice of Tambora, originator of the greatest eruption of...
We all know that walking along the beach on wet sand is easier than dragging our feet through the dry stuff. We all know that wet sand is a very different material from dry – the strange inter-granular capillary physics...
In the lively discussion period following the US premier screening of Sand Wars in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, and following the showing at the Zurich environmental film festival, there was one outstanding theme – surprise. Which is...
The US Premiere of the documentary Sand Wars, to which your humble correspondent contributed, will be shown as part of the Environmental Film Festival in Washington on the 20th March. The Director, Denis Delestrac, and I will be there, and...
Periodically, I become absorbed in the wonders of the images on the Mars High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment site. I recently became exhausted by the process of obtaining permissions for illustrations in the new book and escaped by browsing the...
