SAND dunes on Mars are monsters – around 10 times as big as the largest on Earth. That’s because low gravity gives Martian sand grains a lot more bounce.
Murilo Almeida of the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil, and colleagues built a model that showed sand grains on Mars leap around 100 times higher and further than those on Earth, and travel up to 10 times as fast. This creates dunes with greater wavelengths (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
Martian air is thin, so winds have to be much stronger than on Earth to…
