Mystery of enormous Saharan 'star dune' finally solved — and it wasn't what scientists were expecting

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Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.

A towering, star-shaped dune in the Sahara desert formed in less than a thousand years, new research finds.

These dunes are difficult to study because they're usually in remote locations, and slogging up a few hundred feet of shifting sand is not easy. This look inside the dune revealed a surprisingly short history."The thing that stood out most was how young it is," Bristow said."We expected that a sand dune that is 100 meters high was going to be quite old … thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. And it turned out that this dune was 900 years old."

 

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