Titan's Dunes Took Tens of Thousands of Years To Form 12
sciencehabit writes: Massive dunes, some of them 100 meters tall and a kilometer or more wide at their base, cover about one-eighth of Titan's surface. And they take an exceptionally long time to form, according to a new study. Using radar data gleaned by the Cassini probe when it occasionally swooped past Saturn's haze-shrouded moon, researchers conclude that it would take about 3000 Saturn years (or 88,200 Earth years) to shift Titan's dunes to the extent seen in the images. A similar phenomenon has taken place on Earth, the researchers note: The overall patterns in many large dune fields in the southwestern Sahara and the southwestern United States, shaped by the winds that blew during the most recent ice age more than 10,000 years ago, remain largely unaffected by modern winds that now blow in a different direction.
Not too bad (Score:2)
Still ahead of Jodorowsky's Dune.
Danger: Mobile Sand Dunes On Road (Score:1)
I live in the desert and have observed fast moving dunes and static dunes. Both types have lots of sand blowing about, but somehow the static dunes stay where they are. The static dunes are irregular shaped (star dunes) and can have big trees growing on or around them and the trees do not get covered by the sand. Barcan (crescent) dunes are strange in that they litterally crawl accross a plain. There can be sand/gravel, trees, bushes and rocks in front and behind them, but if one look closely over time,
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hmmm (Score:3)
But. We have only a limited understanding of conditions on a world like Saturn, and extrapolating from a small pool of data is often inaccurate.
Remember how the Mars rovers' lifespan was greatly underestimated? It was believed the sand would eventually collect on the solar power arrays due to the planet's winds. As it happened, the winds actually helped keep them clear.
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This is a guess, but they probably based the solar panel situation on landers' results, which did end up being blocked by dust. Perhaps the landers generally ended up in places where natrual accumulation is worse, or perhaps the act of the rovers turning to different orientations relative to the prevailing winds has made built-up dust easier to shed. Either way, being pessimistic about the performance of
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As a planetary scientist, but mostly working on atmospheres, I have to disagree. This is a very short time for _geological_ processes, but a very long time for processes involving structures of a matter so fine grained that it is easily moved around by wind (sand or with grain size comparable to sand).
At the surface level, the density in molecules per cubic meter of Titan's atmosphere is ~5 times the Earth's atmosphere at sea level, so it does not take much wind (fluid velocity) to move around small grains