Rivers and glaciers have long been considered to be the primary forces influencing the evolution of mountains, but the results of the new study suggest that wind can be just as powerful. ‘No-one had ever thought that wind could be this effective,’ said the study’s lead author, Paul Kapp of the University of Arizona. He and his colleagues estimate that wind can be ten to 100 times more effective in eroding mountains than previously believed.

The team studied gigantic keel-shaped ridges of rock called yardangs in the Qaidam Basin in Central Asia. Seen from space, the huge fields of yardangs in the basin – essentially wind-scoured gouges in the bedrock – look like corduroy.

Kapp wondered where the missing material was, and initially used geological maps of the region and satellite images from Google Earth to look for a likely location. He and his team then visited the Qaidam Basin to collect more information about the yardangs, the history of wind erosion and the dust.

The results led them to propose that during cold, dry glacial periods, there is severe wind erosion in the Qaidam Basin and the dust gets blown out and deposited in the Loess Plateau, home of the largest accumulation of dust on Earth. Scientists believe that most of this dust came from the Gobi Desert, but Kapp and his colleagues suggest that more than half came from the Qaidam Basin, a theory backed up by computer modelling by one of the study’s authors.

May 11