Unlike hard rock, which can dissolve to form caverns and sinkholes, dunes are just big piles of sand formed as wind stacks one grain atop the next.Ī study launched this summer co-led by geologist Todd Thompson. As for natural cavities, dunes aren’t supposed to have any. Their 6-year-old son, they said, had vanished down a hole.Īrgyilan saw no sign of an opening or even upturned sand, which you’d expect if someone had dug a hole. “He’s right here.” His wife, who appeared to be in shock, was calling out to God. She strode up to the site of the commotion and saw a man in swim trunks clawing at the sand. ![]() ![]() But on that July afternoon, Argyilan, an athletic 38-year-old geoscientist at Indiana University Northwest, who was then seven months pregnant with her first child, sensed that something was amiss. Rising 126 feet off the beach, Mount Baldy is one of the tallest lakefront dunes in the world and the most popular attraction at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a national park that straggles for 15 miles along the industrial southern shore of Lake Michigan, between Gary and Michigan City, Indiana.įor many of the park’s two million yearly visitors, the grueling hike up Baldy’s slip-sliding slope-and the dead run down-is a rite of passage. All day, a breeze had rolled off Lake Michigan and up the dune’s rumpled face. It had been a gorgeous afternoon: sunny, mid-70s. ![]() Erin Argyilan was wrapping up a scientific study of wind speeds on Mount Baldy last year when she saw a circle of beachgoers on their knees halfway up the hulking sand dune.
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