Acquired June 12, 2010, this natural-color image shows camel-colored sand dunes marching past Mongolia’s Har Nuur.
Published Jun 27, 2010
This digital elevation map of the Badain Jaran Desert shows multi-generation dunes, with smaller dunes resting atop larger ones.
Published Apr 20, 2011
Ancient rivers and linear dunes decorate the arid landscape.
Published Apr 8, 2013
This detailed true-color image from February 24, 2011, shows the variety of sand dunes that make up the Algodones Dunes in southeastern California.
Published May 27, 2011
Complex wind patterns left these distinctive star-shapes in the sands of the Grand Erg Oriental.
Published Sep 29, 2013
One of the main reasons that rainless regions like the Sahara Desert are interesting from the perspective of landscape science is that the work of flowing water—mainly streams and rivers—becomes less important than the work of wind. Over millennia, if enough sand is available, winds can generate dunes of enormous size, arranged in regular patterns. Long, linear dunes stretch generally north to south across much of northeast Algeria, covering a vast tract (~140,000 square kilometers) of the Sahara Desert known as the Erg Oriental. Erg means “dune sea” in Arabic, and the term has been adopted by modern geologists. Spanning this image from a point on the southwest margin of the erg (image center point: 28.9°N 4.8°W) are a series of 2-kilometer-wide linear dunes, comprised of red sand. The dune chains are more than 100 meters high. The “streets” between the dunes are grayer areas free of sand.
Published Sep 11, 2006
This expansive dune field in northern Mexico was once the shoreline of prehistoric Lake Palomas.
Published Mar 24, 2018
Winds shape the sands that were left behind by an ancient river.
Published Jun 4, 2012
Photographs taken by astronauts on the ISS in 2003 and 2013 show the evolution of a dune field in Chad.
Published Dec 9, 2013
White sand dunes spill across the Snake River Plain in a wide arc in this detailed, photo-like image acquired by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s EO-1 satellite on September 25, 2010.
Published Sep 29, 2010
