Month: January 2019

Saskatchewan’s shifting sands

Picture of a part of the world covered with enormous sand dunes. You may be thinking of a desert in Africa, Asia, or the southwestern United States. But there’s another place, above the 49th parallel, where you can find such sand dunes—Saskatchewan, Canada. Many people associate Saskatchewan with its prairie landscape, but although the southern half of the province—where you’ll find major cities such as Regina and Saskatoon—is mostly prairie grasslands, the northern half is a wild expanse of rivers, lakes, and coniferous forests. In its south-central region it even has a salt lake with a salinity that is half that of the Dead Sea, Little Manitou Lake (Cree for “Lake of Good Spirit”). And Cypress Hills, in the southeastern corner of the province, is the highest point in Canada between Labrador and the Rockies. This diversity is not so surprising when you consider that Saskatchewan is twice the size of Italy and almost as big as Texas.

Located in the far northwest corner of Saskatchewan, almost at the border with the Northwest Territories, the province’s largest lake, Lake Athabasca, is accessible only by floatplane, there being no roads that go that far north. On the south side of the lake is a natural geological formation that is unique and surprising to find at this northern latitude—the Athabasca Sand Dunes. In places 30 meters (98 feet) high, and stretching 100 km (62 miles) along the shore of Lake Athabasca, the Athabasca Sand Dunes are the world’s largest area of active sand dunes north of 58 degrees latitude.

Don’t Desert Me

Although we often associate sand dunes with deserts, in the case of the Athabasca Sand Dunes, this doesn’t hold true. For one thing, deserts are identified by their lack of water, and not only do these dunes border 7,850 square kilometers (3,030 square miles) of water, they also contain significant patches of water in places, percolating up from the shallow water table below. Another feature of deserts—limited plant and animal life—does not hold true for these sand dunes either. In fact, of the 300 plant species that grow in the dunes, there are 10 species that are endemic (found nowhere else in the world), and another 42 species that are considered rare in the province. Not that the dunes are entirely welcoming to the local flora. Because the dunes are active, shifted by wind and eroded by water, they are constantly on the move. Visitors to the region tell of seeing entire stands of skeletal trees emerging from the sand—once above ground and flourishing, these trees were slowly buried by the shifting sand, and now are revealed by further dune movements.

So, if these sand dunes are not a desert ecosystem, created by extreme drought and aridity, how were they formed? The short answer is: the glaciers did it. The sand dunes are the product of the Athabasca sandstone formation, originally a delta in a freshwater lake created out of materials eroded from ancient mountain ranges by glaciers and rivers one billion years ago. These materials were eventually compressed into sandstone, and later still, eroded by wind, water, and glaciers to create the sand dunes that exist today. Of course, I also find the native Dene legend about the dunes’ creation interesting—that a giant man speared a giant beaver, which thrashed and ground the earth with its tail, making soil into sand.

Sand by Me

The dunes are now protected as part of the Athabasca Sand Dunes Provincial Park, but there is little infrastructure to welcome visitors. Aside from lack of accessibility (via floatplane only), there are no services available at the site. You need to be well versed in outdoor survival skills, or sign up for a guided tour. For the armchair traveler, you can see stunning photographs of the dunes on the Photo Journeys blog of photographers Robin and Arlene Karpan.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 3, 2004.

Image credit: Tim Beckett [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re looking for a synonym for the word “thesaurus,” forget about consulting the Merriam-Webster online thesaurus: it says there isn’t one. But of course Thesaurus Day honors Peter Mark Roget, eponym of Roget’s Thesaurus, who was born on this date in 1779. The Roget’s online thesaurus also lists no single-word synonyms for “thesaurus,” though it does suggest “storehouse of words” and “treasury of words.” To celebrate Thesaurus Day, go learn some new words! (You can start with eponym if you don’t already know what it means.)

Image credit: Ray MacLean [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

Getting the feel of the Exploratorium

San Francisco’s Exploratorium is an immense (and immensely popular) hands-on science museum. Exhibits cover the usual range of subjects—electricity, physics, optics, biology, and so on—but with a degree of interactive friendliness that’s rare even in the best science museums (and I’ve seen quite a few). Almost everything is designed to be touched, played with, and experimented on—even by young children, whose destructive impulses know no bounds.

Although I visited the Exploratorium a number of times during the years I lived in San Francisco, there was one exhibit I’d never experienced but always been curious about: something called the Tactile Dome. This is an exhibit for which you must make an advance reservation (and pay extra), and I had never had the foresight to call ahead before visiting the museum to see if there was an open slot. But on one visit when a same-day opening came up, I immediately signed up—after listening to a short speech on all the medical and psychological conditions that would preclude a safe visit and consenting to the non-refundability of the ticket.

A Touching Experience

The Tactile Dome is a smallish geodesic dome within the museum whose stated purpose is to explore the sense of touch—taking the “hands-on” principle to its logical extreme. Inside the dome is a series of oddly shaped chambers lined with a variety of materials. The chambers are completely dark, so visitors must navigate through them—climbing, crawling, sliding, and squeezing—using only the sense of touch for guidance. In an anteroom the eight or so people who have reservations at a given time remove their shoes and any objects that might fall out of pockets and get lost. (They are quite strict about their “no-extraneous-stuff” policy; I wasn’t even allowed to take a ballpoint pen in with me, even though it was capped and sealed in a zippered pocket behind a Velcro flap. I thought that prohibition was a bit silly, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Then, in smaller groups (in my case, a group of one), you proceed into the dark chambers.

A complete trip through the dome takes anywhere from five to ten minutes, and guests are spaced far enough apart that they won’t run into each other. The inside of the dome is not a maze; every chamber has just one entrance and one exit. An attendant in the anteroom monitors your progress by listening to the sounds picked up by microphones positioned throughout the dome. If a visitor gets stuck or panicked, a verbal request for help is all that’s needed; every spot in the dome is immediately reachable by hidden access doors. The intercom (which the other visitors waiting in the anteroom can also hear) serves another purpose, too: to discourage, shall we say, extracurricular activities that the dark and solitary environment might suggest. Each group gets to go through the dome several times during their visit.

As I made my way through the dome, I found that even though sight was not available, it was not a purely tactile experience. Each time I entered a new chamber, I could tell something about its size and shape from the sounds I heard, along with the combination of temperature and airflow I could feel. Even smell played a part—the characteristic scents of carpet, wood, plastics, and the smelly socks of the person who crawled through the dome before me all contributed to a mental image. And that effect was a bit eerie—even though I couldn’t see anything, I had the distinct sensation of visual images of the rooms constructed from the other sensory data I was gathering. That impression alone made the experience worthwhile for me.

Copp-ing a Feel

The Tactile Dome was designed by Dr. August F. Coppola (brother of director Francis Ford Coppola) in 1971 and has been in use ever since. Not only in the choices of materials in the dome, but in its overall design and marketing, it’s definitely showing its age—or perhaps I should say, “revealing” its age. (Note that the photo above is from the early 2000s; the dome is now a more stylish black and has better signs, though the basic design is still the same.) By an interesting coincidence, the Tactile Dome is not the only dome-shaped, building-within-a-building attraction in San Francisco that was constructed in the 1970s and designed to be experienced in total darkness. Audium, located across town, shares all these attributes but was designed to explore the sense of hearing rather than touch. If there’s also a Smell-O-Dome lurking somewhere in the city, I’d just as soon not know.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on June 1, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on July 5, 2004.

Benjamin Franklin was born on this day in 1706. He was, among many other things, a scientist, an inventor, an author, and a diplomat. He led a fascinating life, full of discovery and profound thought, and is certainly among my heroes. (Like all heroes, he was also flawed, but by today’s standards he was practically a saint.) Today, as I take my child to Benjamin Franklin Elementary School (no kidding), I’ll be thinking about the accomplishments and insights of this beloved figure from American history.

Image credit: After Joseph Duplessis [Public domain]