Shifting winds created massive dunes on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon ranging from hundreds of feet’s high and hundreds of mile in length. The scientist who are studying the mechanism of how this dunes are created are puzzled by the enormity of it. Titan has thick atmosphere and dense hydrocarbon lakes filled with methane and ethane. Titan is the only one in our solar system other than Venus, Earth and Mars to have a wind-blown dunes on its surface, but these dunes are totally different than the one we have on earth or Mars. Decades of data collected by the Cassini orbiter and analyzed by the researchers establish that the dunes in Titan composed of hydrocarbons and “may possibly include particles of water ice that are coated with these organic materials.” The sand dunes on Earth and Mars are mainly comprises of silicates.
Devon Burr a planetary scientist at the University of Tennessee led the research. To stimulate the wind condition in Titan the researchers build a wind tunnel at the research center. In the wind tunnel the researchers discovered that the threshold wind speed in the Titan was 50% higher than predicted.
A separate study suggested that long term climate cycles associated with various Saturn’s Orbit was responsible for the shift in wind. This study was about correlation between dune pattern and climate cycles on Titan. The study also discovered that it took nearly 3,000 Saturn years or nearly 90,000 Earth years to form the dunes in result of ever-changing wind in the Titan. He said “We see today sediment being wafted over the Sahara desert, across the Atlantic to South America. This wind-blown material accounts for much of the fertility of the Amazon Basin”, he also mentioned that “Understanding this process is essential.”
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