Beautiful Sand Dunes of the Rub’ al Khali Desert

I'm neck-deep in one of those weeks where it feels like I can barely stop and rest for a minute, much less write a blog post worth reading. So, instead, here are some striking images of sand dunes in the Rub’ al Khali desert of the Arabian Peninsula:

The Rub’ al Khali is one of the largest sand deserts in the world, encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. It includes parts of Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The desert covers 650,000 square kilometers, more than the area of France. Largely unexplored until recently, the desert is 1000 km long and 500 km wide. With daytime temperatures reaching 55 degrees Celsius, and dunes taller than 330 meters, the desert may be one of the most forbidding places on Earth. The image was acquired December 2, 2005, covers an area of 54.8 x 61.9 km.

In the zoomed-in image below note the superposition of smaller and smaller bedforms.

If you want to get into the details of sand dune formation, this 2005 paper by Kocurek and Ewing in the journal Geomorphology explores dune patterns within concepts of self-organization.

Images: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team / link