Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 13: Poster - Glasses / Stat. Phys. Bio. / Networks (joint session DY/BP/CPP/SOE)

DY 13.6: Poster

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 09:30–12:30, P1

Stability of Barchan Dune Fields — •Sven Auschra, Marc Lämmel, and Klaus Kroy — Institut für theoretische Physik, Leipzig, Germany

Crescent-shaped barchan dunes are among the most impressive structures observed in arid regions on Earth and Mars. Although they are isolated from nearby dunes by bedrock, models suggests that truly isolated barchans would be unstable with respect to their mass balance [1]. This suggests that some sort of interactions between the dunes in a dune field give rise to some size stabilization resulting in the empirically observed uniform size distribution along the dune field [2, 3].

To uncover the underlying mechanism, we perform a mass stability analysis for a pair of consecutive dunes in a barchan field. Sand supplied from the horn of the windward dune to its downwind neighbor initiates a complex response of its shape and mass. Based on a dimensionally reduced description justified by a closeby shape attractor, a one-dimensional fixed-point equation for the mass balance of the downwind dune is derived and analyzed for stable solutions.

[1]Fischer, Cates and Kroy, Phys. Rev. E 77, 031302, 2008.

[2]Hersen, Andersen, Elbelrhiti, Andreotti, Claudin and Douady, Phys. Rev. E 69, 011304, 2004.

[3]Duran, Schwämmle, Lind and Herrmann, Nonlin. Processes Geophys. 69, 455-467, 2001.