Week 3 - Deserts

                                 Glamis Dunes retreived from http://glamisdunescalifornia.blogspot.com

                                   

My Trip to the Glamis Dunes

Recently a couple of us took a road trip to the Glamis Dunes. The Glamis dunes are an off-road vehicle recreational area as a part of the larger Algodones Dunes. We rode our motorcycles from San Diego to the sand dunes. This was an incredibly unique experience. At one part of the ride, all I could see in any direction were sand dunes. The sand had this wavy surface as far as you could see, so it looked like a sea of sand. According to the Bureau of Land Management, the size of Glamis Dunes is 40 miles long and 5 miles wide.

These Sand dunes were huge and had gradual slopes to them. I didn’t see any vegetation of any kind. These dunes had long ridges that were separated by lower areas you could use as a ramp. Since the wind was a right angle to the long ridges of the many sand dunes I could tell these were transverse dunes. The moderate to strong wind can move these dunes up to 1 foot a year according to the Bureau of Land Management.

This desert is 150 miles inland from the cold Pacific Ocean. So it is adjacent to an offshore cold oceanic current. This would be one reason why there is such a dry climate here. “The Northern Hemisphere contains another, much smaller area of subtropical desert and steppe in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States” (Lutgens, Tarbuck, Tasa, 2018. p. 424). So this would place Glamis dunes right in the subtropical desert. That’s also why where I live in San Diego (just west of Glamis dunes) is known for its clear skies and sunshine. But since Glamis dunes are only a semiarid desert, another reason why this area is so dry is that there is a small rain shadow created by the Laguna Mountain range. This small mountain range stops any last bit of rain or moisture from getting to the Glamis Dunes.

Thanks,

       Will

Resources:

Bureau of Land Management. Imperial Sand Dunes. Retrieved July 18^th. https://www.blm.gov/visit/imperial-sand-dunes

Glamis Dunes. Picture retrieved on July 18th from http://glamisdunescalifornia.blogspot.com/

Lutgens, Frederick K.; Tarbuck, Edward J.; Tasa, Dennis G. (2018). Essentials of Geology. Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.