The singing sand dunes of the Sahara

BBC Earth Podcast

Jenkins Laura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Tv & Film

4.6 • 611 Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome to another episode of the BBC Earth Podcast; the podcast that delves deep into nature’s great mysteries and surfaces the unknown.

This week we’re telling stories of the unexpected, stories which seem too astounding to be true. Journey with us to the Sahara where the sand is known to sing; deep, bassy sounds that reverberate as the millions upon millions of grains fall down the dunes. From the unknown cause of these sounds to the unknown status of a species, let us take you back to the 1930s, when the Tasmanian Tiger was confirmed “extinct”. Unlike the tiger you have pictured in your imagination, this one was more dog-like, with stripes across its back and a tail not dissimilar to that of a kangaroo. There have supposedly been 8 sightings of this creature in the last 3 years, suggesting science should not give up on it just yet…

Should these stories leave you perplexed, just wait until you hear from Doug Larson who was the first to discover an ancient forest, undisturbed since deglaciation. These 700 year-old trees had never been found by humans until Doug came along.. Mind. Blown.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from BBC Studios.
0:03.0	BBC Studios.
0:04.0	A commercial subsidiary of the BBC.
0:09.0	Welcome to the BBC Earth podcast, the podcast that's taking a journey into the unknown.
0:18.0	I'm Emily Knight.
0:20.0	In this episode, we're pushing at the limits of our
0:24.6	understanding. We're investigating mysteries in the natural world and finding out how much there is out
0:30.7	there that we just don't know. Our first mystery is one that's been baffling travellers for centuries.
0:40.2	Marco Polo thought it was spirits of the desert.
0:43.6	Charles Darwin wrote about a bellowing hill in Chile.
0:47.6	And in Michigan, it's said to be the mournful singing of a woman to her drowned lover.
0:52.8	Sometimes, when the weather and the wind is just right, the desert sings.
0:59.2	My name is Melanie Hunt. I'm a professor in mechanical engineering at Caltech.
1:04.5	Melanie's thing is fluid mechanics.
1:07.0	She studies how things flow.
1:09.2	Not just liquids, but gases and powders too.
1:12.6	Powder is perhaps the most complex of them all.
1:15.1	At the time, I was looking at toner, flows of toner.
1:17.9	So in a high-speed printing process, you're actually moving this toner very quickly.
1:22.0	And one of the issues with the toner is that it could melt.
1:27.4	One day, some of Melanie's students surprised her with a gift, a gift from the desert.
1:33.3	From where I'm at the Kaltzak, the closest place is about three hours.
	...

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