7 - Substrate effects on desert surface physics

Summary

Deserts have been the setting for many expressions of the literary and visual arts because of the romanticism of the barren landscape. The following discusses a French film of army life in the Sahara in terms of the psychological impact of the desert.

The originality of the film lies in its treatment of the character's difficult physical, and above all, psychological adaptation to the desert, where people used to city life must come to terms with a scale of values that has been turned upside down. They discover the futility of trying to master time and space in a constantly changing environment. The sand erodes everything except the memory of passions. Even speech becomes meaningless when the characters realize that the desert is a world where life is measured out in silence.

Mouny Berrah, Algerian sociologist and journalist Screenplays in the desert (1994)

The author describes areas of desert sand dunes, or ergs.

Instead of finding chaos and disorder, the observer never fails to be amazed at the simplicity of the form, and exactitude of repetition, and a genetic order unknown in nature on a scale larger than that of a crystalline structure. In places vast accumulations of sand weighing millions of tons move inexorably, in regular formation, over the surface of the country, growing, retaining their shape, even breeding, in a manner which, by its grotesque imitation of life, is vaguely disturbing to an imaginative mind.

Ralph A. Bagnold, British scientist and adventurer The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (1954)