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Virtual Vista: Sand Hills, Cherry County, Nebraska, USA Strip the grass from the high plains of north-central Nebraska and you are left with spacious skies and amber waves of…sand! The Nebraska Sand Hills occupy over 50,000 square kilometers of north-central Nebraska and south-central South Dakota. The image below views a small portion of the sand hills region looking toward the northeast along the axis of a field of transverse dunes.
Other forms of sand dunes are found among the sand hills, and many dunes reach heights of tens of meters. Small, shallow lakes commonly occupy the interdune lows throughout the sand hills region. Though the original morphology of these dunes has been greatly modified by wind, rainfall, and vegetation over thousands of years, it is still possible to identify the asymmetry of the dune profiles if you look carefully.
The left-hand side of the dune in the image above faces northwest and has a somewhat gentler slope than the right-hand side of the dune (facing southeast). The gentler slope is on the upwind side of this transverse dune, indicating a dominant wind blowing from the northwest toward the southeast. To learn more about the Nebraska Sand Hills, your library might contain An
Atlas of the Sand Hills, a publication of the Conservation
and Survey Division of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources
in Nebraska. Soar over the Nebraska Sand Hills in your hang glider by clicking on the link below! Points to Ponder: Having trouble loading or viewing the video clip? You will need the DivX video codec for your media player to watch the video. The DivX codec is available free from www.divx.com. Click on the link or type the URL into your browser to go to the DivX download site. Once at the DivX site, follow the "DOWNLOAD" links until you locate the download "Standard DivX Codec (FREE)" hyperlink. Click on the link and download the small DivX codec file. The codec file may take a few minutes to load. Please be patient. Once the file is downloaded to your local computer, double click on the file to automatically install the Divx codec.You may also discover that the Virtual Vistas work best with the Windows Media Player, available as a free download from www.microsoft.com. Click on the link or type the URL into your browser to go to the Microsoft web site. Once at the web site, type "windows media player" into the Search box, then click on the appropriate link to download the latest version of Windows Media Player. |
Sand Hills Fly By (1693.0K)