From Marco Polo’s time, there are accounts of caravans in the desert who heard mysterious musical sounds emanating from the dunes. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Well, travelers in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert still report hearing these ancient sounds.
Michael Novacek is curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 1990, he’s led an expedition every summer to the Gobi, searching for dinosaur fossils. And on occasion, he and his team have heard the phenomenon know as booming sands.
“Well you might be camping near a sand dune and when the wind picks up this kind of whirring, booming sound occurs. Those of us who have heard it before, say ‘Oh, there it is!’ When you bring a new team member out to the Gobi for the first time, among the other things they’re amazed and disoriented by are the sounds of the sand. It’s a remarkable sound.”
It turns out that in regions of the Gobi and a dozen or so other places around the world, the sand particles are a particular shape: smooth and round, as opposed to a typical grain of sand, which is coarse and irregular. Well, with this smooth type of grain, in dry weather conditions, when sand cascades down a dune, the particles collide against each other and there is enough acoustical energy produced to create this booming effect. It’s a sound which may be older than the bones buried in the dunes.
“We have evidence in the rocks of massive and widespread sand dunes in the Gobi, eighty million years ago. I think we’re probably not being too fanciful in thinking that those dinosaurs we’re digging up– those eighty million year old creatures from the cretaceous of the Gobi desert– heard those sounds, of those singing dunes.”
Additional funding for this Pulse of the Planet has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.