News
Physicist solves desert mystery From Marco Polo onwards explorers have told stories about strange sounds they have heard in the desert. It is known that the sounds are produced by sand dunes when they avalanche, but the exact mechanism behind the phenomenon has remained a mystery. Now, Bruno Andreotti from the University of Paris-7 has proposed that the sounds come from vibrations in the sand bed that have been excited by collisions between grains of sand (Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 238001).
|