Sweeney and colleagues conducted a number of tests on large, mobile transverse dunes, smaller, vegetated coppice dunes, and dry river and lake beds. The PI-SWERL, a technology developed by the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas, NV, can measure the potential of dust emissions in places otherwise unaccessible to large field wind tunnels.
#COPPICE DUNES PORTABLE#
In order to test whether sand dunes could produce substantial amounts of dust, Mark Sweeney, a dust researcher from the University of South Dakota, Huayu Lu and students from Nanjing University, and Joe Mason from the University of Wisconsin-Madison used portable wind tunnel technology, the Portable in situ Wind Erosion Laboratory (PI-SWERL) to measure the potential of dunes to emit dust in the Ulan Buh, Tengger, and Mu Us deserts of northern China in 2013. Recent research by scientists including those in the UK and Israel, however, revealed that sand grain collisions resulted in breaking and chipping of sand grains, highlighting a potentially important dust generation mechanism.
Sand dunes, a common feature of many deserts, are composed almost entirely of sand and are usually ignored as dust sources unless sand grains - which move by saltation - a series of bouncing - sand blasts sedimentary deposits containing dust sized material (silt and clay particles less than 63 micrometers in size). A better understanding of the potential sources of dust can help plan and mitigate for the next dust storm or identify problem dust sources in the future. Dust is important from a variety of environmental and health-related issues and over longer time scales impacts climate change and has accumulated to great thicknesses to form the vast Chinese loess plateau. view moreĭust storms are a common occurrence in the deserts of northern China and previous researchers have attempted to locate the most important sources of dust. Image: These are coppice dunes from the Jilantai area, China.
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