Seemingly Lifeless Deserts Breathe Humid Air in Decade Long Research Project

Deserts often seem lifeless and inert; however, they are very much alive. Sand dunes, specifically, grow and move according to a recently concluded decade-long study; deserts also breathe humid air.

Technology For Measuring the Breath of the Desert

(Photo: Walid Ahmad/ Pexel:)

The findings of the study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, titled " showed, for the first time, how water vapor penetrates the grains and powders of the desert and could have wide-ranging applications beyond the desert, especially in pharmaceutical research, planetary exploration, agriculture, and food processing.

Led by Michel Louge, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering from the Colege of Engineering, the study spanned a great deal of time and a wide variety of terrain. It began almost 40 years ago; Louge studied the behaviors of solid particles, fluids, and gasses.

With the desire to measure matter with greater sensitivity, together with his students, they developed a new form of instrumentation known as capacitance probes that used multiple sensors to record everything from water content, velocity, to solid concentration with unprecedented spatial resolution.

When a colleague from the University of Utah suggested that the technology might prove to help image the layers of mountains of snowpacks and assess the likelihood of avalanches, Lounge went to his garage, grabbed probes, and tested them out during a snowstorm. Soon he struck up a partnership with Capacitec Inc to combine their skills in electronics and geometry. The resulting probes proved useful in hydrology research.

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The Life of the Desert and Sand Dunes

The probe revealed the porosity of the sand, with tiny amounts of air seeping through. Previous researchers hinted the seepage existed in sand dunes, but none have been able to prove it until now.

Lounge explains that the wind flows over the desert dunes, and as a result, it creates an imbalance in the local pressure; this forces air to go in and out of the sand dunes, hence the sand is breathing, seemingly like an organism, reports VerveTimes.

The breathing observed allows microbes to persist deep into the hyper-air sand dunes, despite the high temperatures. For much of the last few decades, Lounge has collaborated with Anthony Hay, an associate professor of microbiology from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, to study how the microbes help stabilize the dunes and prevent them from encroaching on infrastructure and roads.

The team also determined that the desert surface exchanges less moisture with the atmosphere than previously believed, with the water evaporation from individual sand grains behaving like slow chemical reactions.

The bulk of the data gathered was gathered in 2011, but it took the team another decade to understand some of the findings, such as identifying the various disturbances at the desert's surface level that force evanescent waves of humidity to propagate down through the sand dunes rapidly.

Lounge explains that the team could have published the data 10 years ago; however, it wasn't satisfying until the team understood what was going on. Nobody had done anything like the recent study; this was the first time such low levels of humidity were measured.