Ralph Bagnold (1896–1990) founded our modern understanding of the interaction between wind and sand and how that interaction produces dune-covered landscapes in the Earth’s great deserts. He lived to see spacecraft images of the sand seas on Mars and contributed to our understanding of how universally important wind-driven (eolian) processes are. He would have been delighted to know about the extensive dune fields of tarry sand on Titan.

Bagnold was a professional soldier and the descendent of a long line of professional soldiers (Bagnold, 1990). After an engineering education at Cambridge, he was posted to Egypt in 1926 and then to other locations in North Africa where he became fascinated by the landscape and decided to devote himself to the study of that region’s most abundant commodity – sand. In addition to unprecedented trips deep into the deserts of Sudan and Libya, he built a wind tunnel out of plywood at Imperial College, London, to further his understanding of the interaction of wind and sand. His classic book was published in 1941.