Years before Frank Herbert published his world-renowned “Dune” series, he was a small town reporter covering dune erosion along the Oregon coast. Herbert's fascination with the unique ecology of Oregon’s dunes inspired him to research desert formations worldwide and eventually write the Dune series.
But dune formations aren't just in Oregon, or in hot climates, like Arrakis. They are also found in Alaska, in deserts above the Arctic circle.
Kobuk Valley National Park, located between the Northwest Arctic communities of Kiana and Ambler, is home to two arctic dune fields, including the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes – the largest arctic dune field in North America. It’s about the size of Manhattan, roughly 25 square miles.
“I think the coolest way to visualize how big it is, is just to go on Google Maps and do the satellite view and try to zoom in,” said Annie Carlson, resource manager for the National Parks Service in Kotzebue. “They're really distinct — this large, almost like a small ocean of sand in the middle of the boreal forest.”
Like the fictional Arrakis, Carlson said the Kobuk Sand Dunes are home to worms – tiny microscopic roundworms called nematodes.
“There's definitely not giant sandworms like Arrakis,” Carlson said.
The dunes also support many larger animals as well — caribou, bears, foxes, wolves and many other arctic animals pass through. Carlson said it's also home to flies, and to solitary bees that help pollinate several species of plants.
While many plants can’t grow in the harsh environment, some have uniquely adapted to it. There is one plant that has only been documented around the Great Kobuk Sand dunes – the Kobuk locoweed.
Carlson said it’s challenging for plants to move out of the tundra and colonize the sand.
“As the wind blows, the dunes will shift,” she said.
In Frank Herbert's Dune, the inhabitants of Arrakis work covertly to terraform the desert in the hopes that plants would eventually cover the surface of the planet. Something similar is already happening in the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes, but without direct human intervention. Carlson said Alaska’s arctic dunes have become progressively greener since their formation during the last Ice Age, tens of thousands of years ago.
“Ninety percent of what was originally deposited as sand has since been overgrown by forest and tundra, so just 10% remains,” Carlson said.
She said human-caused climate change is accelerating that process.Without plant life to absorb the direct sunlight hitting the sand, in the summer it can reach temperatures of 90 degrees on the dunes.
As the Arctic soils warm, Carlson expects more plants will take root in the area. And scientists expect the new plant growth and higher temperatures to speed up the thaw of the permafrost underneath the dunes.
But it's not just warming temperatures that are erasing the park’s dunes. Carlson said they’re also being lost to the wind, one grain at a time.
“Because they're high latitude dunes, they move much more slowly, in part because they're frozen,” Carlson said. “They have snow and ice on top of them for eight or nine months of the year.”
And while it's not on a far-away planet, this unique characteristic led NASA scientists to study the movement of the dunes nearly two decades ago. Carlson said they share characteristics of our red, neighboring planet.
“So it seems like, geomorphologically, that Mars is almost frozen,” said Carlson. “They were able to detect a dune field on Mars moving very slowly, using the satellite technology that they developed by studying the movement of the Kobuk Sand Dunes.”
But not a lot of regular people get to see this process for themselves. Carlson said the Kobuk Valley National Park gets only a fraction of the visitors other national parks get because of its remoteness. To see the dunes, people would have to fly in or boat down the Kobuk River. From there, it's still a couple mile hike from the river. Carlson estimates fewer than 1,000 people visit Kobuk Valley every year. Which she said is unfortunate, given the dunes’ unique beauty.
“The shadows are so beautiful as they sort of shift around the dunes and the Arctic sun being fairly low in the sky, if you get that effect of the shadows really well,” Carlson said. “I think if you're somewhere where the sun's just directly above your head, you wouldn't see it as well. They're really lovely.”
