(ORDO NEWS) — In China, for the first time on the coast of the country discovered a mysterious acoustic phenomenon – the so-called singing sands. Scientists made the discovery on the territory of the tropical island province of Hainan.
According to the Xinhua news agency, the discovery was made by specialists from the Northwestern Institute of Environment and Resources (NIEER) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Singing sands have been discovered in Hainan, and this is the first time such a phenomenon has been recorded on the Chinese coastline.
The phenomenon itself is not unique. Singing sands are found in many countries, including Russia. There are also in China, in many interior regions of this country. However, singing sands have not yet been found on the coast.
And now the NIEER team has discovered several such sites along the coast of Clearwater Bay, the Shenzhou Peninsula and other parts of Hainan.
Singing sands are often also referred to as thundering, whistling, musical, and even barking sands. This phenomenon has not been fully studied.
The generally accepted theory is that it occurs in areas of the desert or coastline where wind sounds are naturally produced due to a combination of physical characteristics of the sand, including grain size and composition.
A new study shows that in Hainan, unique geomorphology and wave dynamics have formed well-sorted coastal sands in terms of their grain size. The scientists compared the characteristics of coastal singing sands with those of desert sands. It turned out that they are different from each other.
Thus, in coastal areas, the sand surface has typical V-shaped craters formed by underwater mechanical action. As a result of this mechanism, a well-developed surface porous structure is formed, which is an important factor in sound control.
The frequency spectrum of the coastal singing sands turned out to be narrower than that of the desert ones. It is distinguished by a significant proportion of sharp and high-frequency sounds.
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