Coevolving aerodynamic and impact ripples on Earth

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the simultaneous formation of coevolving ripples of different scales on sand beds, revealing distinct mechanisms and proposing a unified framework for understanding mesoscale bedforms across planetary bodies.

Contribution

It uncovers two adjacent growth instabilities in sand ripples, linking smaller impact ripples to hydrodynamic origins and larger ripples to granular instabilities, unifying their formation mechanisms.

Findings

Reproducible creation of coevolving ripples in wind tunnels.

Identification of impact ripples as granular in origin.

Hydrodynamic origin for larger ripples, connecting to megaripples and Martian ripples.

Abstract

Windblown sand creates multiscale bedforms on Earth, Mars, and other planetary bodies. According to conventional wisdom, decameter-scale dunes and decimeter-scale ripples emerge via distinct mechanisms on Earth: a hydrodynamic instability related to a phase shift between the turbulent flow and the topography, and a granular instability related to a synchronization of hopping grains with the topography. Here, we report the reproducible creation of coevolving centimeter and decimeter-scale ripples on fine-grained monodisperse sand beds in ambient-air and low-pressure wind-tunnels, revealing two adjacent mesoscale growth instabilities. Their morphological traits and our quantitative grain-scale numerical simulations authenticate the smaller structures as impact ripples but point at a hydrodynamic origin for the larger ones. This suggests that the aeolian transport layer would have to partially respond to the topography on a scale comparable to the average hop length, hence faster than previously thought, but consistent with the phase lag of the inferred aeolian sand flux relative to the wind. Hydrodynamic modelling supports the existence of hydrodynamic aerodynamic ripples on Earth, connecting them mechanistically to megaripples and to the debated Martian ripples. We thereby propose a unified framework for mesoscale granular bedforms found across the Solar System.