Singing sands

For some reason, perhaps for a bit of light relief from my diet of Simenon, I have been re-reading the easy going, but interesting travelogue at reference 1. I overlook the fact that the book was written by a pair of middle aged lady missionaries poking their noses into remote corners of China.

Yesterday, I came across a reference to singing, if not booming, sands. Intrigued, I asked Bing who turned up the Wikipedia entry (reference 1) from which one can jump to the more learned reference 2. Seemingly reasonably rare, but to be found at various places around the world, including Dunhuang in China, snap above. Some fiddling about with gmaps (StreetView does not seem to work out here) and I decide that this is the same place that my book is talking about under the name Tunhwang. Some of whose treasures were bought up more than a century ago by an intrepid baronet, treasures which wound up in the British Museum. Given that he appears to have paid a proper price, money which enabled the monks to repair and maintain their temples - probably now a World Heritage Site - not clear to me that we should be returning them. Perhaps give half of them back as a cultural courtesy?

PS: it seems also that this phenomenon is related to the hot, squeaking sand we came across on beaches in the vicinity of Talmont St. Hilaire, a place otherwise being better known for a castle which used to belong to the chap known as Bluebeard, otherwise Gilles de Rais, Marshall of France and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. See, for example, reference 4.

Reference 1: The Gobi Desert - Cable and French - 1942.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_sand.

Reference 3: Solving the mystery of booming sand dunes - N.M. Vriend, L. Hunt, R.W. Clayton, C.E. Brennen, K.S. Brantley, and A. Ruiz-Angulo - 2007. To be found at https://authors.library.caltech.edu/28368/1/VREgrl07.pdf.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/11/joan-of-arc.html.

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