Working Group Conference
Global Sand Seas: Past Present and Future
This meeting took place on the 18th October 2010, at the Royal Geographical Society in London and provided the working group with an opportunity to both explain the atlas and to explore ways in which we felt that atlas data could be used to answer fundamental scientific questions about sand seas. In addition, we brought together a range of international speakers to cover a variety of topics associated with the development of global sand seas. Along with a very full poster exhibition, this meeting generated considerable discussion around the geomorphology of global sand seas.
We were very grateful to acknowledge grant support from the British Society for Geomorphology and the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers. We were also pleased to recieve additional funding for this meeting from the Quaternary Research Association, Elsevier and Oxford University Press.
A copy of the conference abstracts volume can be downloaded (Global Sand Seas Abstracts PDF), and copies of some of the presentations have been made available below. Please contact members of the working group for any further information relating to the conference.
| Speaker(s) | Title of Presentation | Download |
|---|---|---|
| Kevin White University of Reading |
An introduction to the Namib Digital Dune Atlas (Working Group Presentation 1) |  |
| Nicholas Lancaster Desert Research Institute |
Global sand seas – present status (Elsevier Aeolian Research Keynote Lecture) |  |
| Xiaoping Yang Chinese Academy of Sciences |
Large scale controls on the development of sand seas in northern China |  |
| Philippe Claudin CNRS‐ESPCI, Paris |
What controls the size of dunes? ‘Elementary’ and ‘giant’ dunes |  |
| Robert Bryant University of Sheffield |
Characterising the wind regime of sand seas: data sources and scaling issues (Working Group Presentation 2) |  |
| Joanna Bullard Loughborough University |
Morphometric analysis of aeolian bedforms using ASTER data (Working Group Presentation 3) |  |
| Paul Hesse Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia |
Global sand seas – past (Quaternary Research Association Keynote Lecture) |
not available |
| Kathryn E Fitzsimmons Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
Investigating dune sediments as palaeoenvironmental indicators: examples from the Strzelecki and Tirari Deserts of central Australia |
 |
| Stephen Wolfe Geological Survey of Canada |
The Canadian Dune Archipelago: interpreting past environments from cold‐climate dunefields |  |
| Tim Reynolds Birkbeck, University of London |
The Saharan sand seas – the challenge for future research on human evolution |  |
| Dawn Chatty University of Oxford |
Authenticity in a desert landscape: The Harasiis people in the Jiddat‐il‐Harasiis, Sultanate of Oman | not available |
| Lori K Fenton Carl Sagan Center |
Sand seas beyond Earth |  |
| Andreas Baas King’s College London |
Using the Namib digital atlas to model the future (Working Group Presentation 4) |
not available |