Snipped from LiveScientist.com.

Now this is pretty darn cool. I never really knew there was anything special about how sand moved about in a desert. The below article describes how sand is not only moved around by wind, but by electrical static as well. It is said that as the sand moves about the Earth because of wind, it strikes the surface of the Earth and picks up electrons, and along with it, a negative charge. The sand on the ground is then left with a positive charged.

What happens is as the sand passes over the ground at a low level it attracts the sand on the ground and pulls it into the air. In the end you get two things: sand movement by electric charge and the airborne sand stays close to the ground even as the wind gusts get stronger because of this opposing charge. Cool!

Here is a small portion of the article:

Sweeping sands across the Sahara and other dune expanses are blown by more than just wind, scientists have discovered. Powerful electric fields spring up near the desert floor and propel sand grains into the air.

By accounting for this electricity, researchers say they can design better climate change models, and even explain features of the dust on Mars.

Scientists have long been at a loss to explain why sand sweeping across the desert doesn’t bounce higher when the wind gets stronger. But when researchers at the University of Michigan made the first calculations of electricity’s role in this dance of particles, they were finally able to match their models with observations.