Eureka Dunes, Death Valley National Park EarthCache
Eureka Dunes, Death Valley National Park
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Eureka Dunes is located in the heart of Death Valley National Monument and provides the rare opportunity to listen to booming dunes.
For centuries, explorers and naturalists throughout the world have described strange sounds emanating from sand dunes. Strange squeaking sounds are also produced by beach sand by simply compressing the sand with your foot or poking it with a rod. Some of the earliest references about "acoustical" dunes are found in Chinese and Mideastern chronicles dating back more than 1500 years. Marco Polo described weird sounds on a journey through the Gobi Desert, and Charles Darwin mentioned it while traveling through Chile. The sounds have been variously described as singing, whistling, squeaking, roaring and booming.
Some accounts compare the sounds with distant kettle drums, artillery fire, thunder, low-flying propeller aircraft, bass violins, pipe organs and humming telegraph wires. Low frequency sounds are produced when closely packed sand grains slide over each other, such as an avalanche down the slip face of a dune. The stationary sand underneath apparently acts as a giant sounding board or amplifier to produce the enormous volume of sound. The sand must be very dry for sound production, and under a microscope the grains appear more rounded and finely polished compared with ordinary (silent) sand. Astronomers and geologists have speculated that this remarkable phenomenon may be common in the windy and nearly waterless sand dunes on Mars!
Acoustical "booming" dunes are rather widespread on earth, including the Sahara Desert, Middle East, South Africa, Chile, Baja California and the Hawaiian Islands. California has at least two documented areas with booming dunes, the massive Kelso Dunes of San Bernardino County and the scenic Eureka Dunes of Inyo County.
Excerpt written by Wayne P. Armstrong and taken from the website (visit link)
To get credit for this cache, post a picture of yourself on top of the dunes and a close up of your GPS with the coordinates visible and email a description to the best of your ability of the sound the dunes make.
Congratulations to blazek and HRO for their 10,000th find!
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