Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Singing Dunes

Several years ago I hiked up the Kelso Dunes in the Mohave Desert in California, then sat and slid down them to the bottom. If you’ve ever tried this, or heard a similar avalanche of sand, you know that the…
December 9, 2004

Several years ago I hiked up the Kelso Dunes in the Mohave Desert in California, then sat and slid down them to the bottom. If you’ve ever tried this, or heard a similar avalanche of sand, you know that the sand emits a distinctive and mysterious low whining sound, which some people call “singing” and some call “booming.” According to physicist Bruno Andreotti, who’s been studying the phenomenon, the noise can be as 105 decibels and, being low-frequency, can be heard up to 10 kilometers away.

Studying actual dunes, Andreotti found that vibrations in the sand act like slow-moving elastic sound waves that run across the surface of the dunes. The vibration of the sand bed tends to synchronize the collisions, and the surface of the sand bed acts like the membrane in a loudspeaker, accounting for the sound.

Try it next time you’re out in the desert.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.