Thanks to a fortuitous correspondence with Suvrat on the issues of dams, I discovered that comments to this blog over the last ten days or so may have encountered problems and never appeared (I received no notifications - possibly as a result of a blizzard of spam, that I hadn’t picked up on, clogging things up). I’ve now deleted all the spam and added a “captcha” requirement and it seems to be working again.
_However, if anyone tried to leave a comment and found that it was never posted, I sincerely apologise - and would be delighted if you would re-post it!
_
Meanwhile, sand in the news:
1. Sand theft turns Mexican beach into a crime scene
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jgHmDqLU_femenG_nkw722vLPzlAD99P68DO0
2. Massive sand engineering project in Grand Isle, Louisiana
3. Not directly to do with sand, but dramatic - a new sinkhole in Texas (is this where the comments ended up?)
http://www.kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?s=10810490
[sand alphabet courtesy of Umbrella Corporation
Comments
Well, I’ll take the opportunity to submit my first comment, then.
Mostly, I’d just like to say that I’ve been following your blog for a while, and I think it is fantastic. Truly fascinating are the subjects on which yo write here.
Also, I thought I’d mention that I’ve just seen the National Geographic Channel’s “America’s Wild Spaces: Death Valley”, which among other things, demonstrates the singing/booming sand dune effect. I’ve read about it before, but, what a sound! Complete with cross-section diagram of how the sound waves travel through the top layer of dry sand. Very cool.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/death-valley-4296/Overview#tab-Videos/06912_00
Not sure how recent this production is, but if I’ve seen it before, I missed this part.
Cheers!
Glad you took the opportunity! And thanks for the link - I hadn’t seen that video before. The initial sounds seem more like a didgeridoo than anything. It’s a while since I’ve checked on the status of research into dune sounds, but it certainly used to be quite a controversial topic, with different groups of researchers arguing vociferously in favour of their particular models. Time for a bit of update research, I think!
Cheers
M