![]() In California’s Death Valley, “sailing stones” cruise the desert floor under a locomotion that science struggled for decades to explain. Yet here, in the well-traveled regions of Earth, on the very ground we walk, we are still being surprised by geologic mystery. We live in an era when the robotic arms of unmanned spaceships can scoop sand on Mars, then phone home across millions of miles to tell us its chemistry. Worst of all, though, was a recurring thought: “If they had listened to me, they wouldn’t have kept looking.” As a mom-to-be, she wished she’d tried to comfort the boy’s mother. She scolded herself for not digging alongside the father. She sobbed on the way home, and spent a sleepless night on the couch, hunting online for any reports of similar cases. Ground-penetrating radar found 66 points on the dune's surface that might have something other than solid sand below. Within a month, scientists began surveying a swath of dune near where the Illinois boy had vanished. Everything she knew about geology-all the courses she’d taken, all the papers she’d read over years of study-told her this couldn’t happen. “I felt absolutely shattered,” Argyilan remembers. He had no pulse or breath at first, and his sand-encrusted body was ice-cold. ![]() As they finished their meal, the restaurant’s TV screens flashed with news from Baldy: After a three-and-a-half hour search involving 50 rescuers and a pair of construction-site excavators, the boy was found a dozen feet beneath the dune’s surface. ![]() At 6 p.m., almost two hours after his disappearance, she packed up her wind meter and drove home.įor dinner that night, Argyilan, her fiancé and her father went to a nearby Applebee’s. She scanned Baldy’s taupe slopes, sure the boy was just hiding somewhere. But now, as park brass arrived to coordinate an emergency response, Argyilan kept a cool distance. The sand-laced 50-mile-per-hour gusts scoured the numbers off her surveying rod. As Hurricane Sandy bore down the October before, she’d summited Baldy in ski goggles to record the erosional brawn of the winds and waves. Someone had called 911, and soon police and firefighters were clambering over Baldy’s crest with shovels.Īrgyilan, a former CrossFit trainer with a nose stud and shoulder tattoo, was no milquetoast. “This doesn’t make any sense,” Argyilan told a pair of fieldworkers from the National Park Service, who’d been helping lug around her 45-pound wind meter. Liz Kaye / Indiana University Communications ![]() Unlike hard rock, which can dissolve to form caverns and sinkholes, dunes are just big piles of sand formed as wind stacks one grain atop the next.Ī study launched this summer co-led by geologist Todd Thompson. As for natural cavities, dunes aren’t supposed to have any. Their 6-year-old son, they said, had vanished down a hole.Īrgyilan saw no sign of an opening or even upturned sand, which you’d expect if someone had dug a hole. “He’s right here.” His wife, who appeared to be in shock, was calling out to God. She strode up to the site of the commotion and saw a man in swim trunks clawing at the sand. But on that July afternoon, Argyilan, an athletic 38-year-old geoscientist at Indiana University Northwest, who was then seven months pregnant with her first child, sensed that something was amiss. Rising 126 feet off the beach, Mount Baldy is one of the tallest lakefront dunes in the world and the most popular attraction at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a national park that straggles for 15 miles along the industrial southern shore of Lake Michigan, between Gary and Michigan City, Indiana.įor many of the park’s two million yearly visitors, the grueling hike up Baldy’s slip-sliding slope-and the dead run down-is a rite of passage. All day, a breeze had rolled off Lake Michigan and up the dune’s rumpled face. It had been a gorgeous afternoon: sunny, mid-70s. Erin Argyilan was wrapping up a scientific study of wind speeds on Mount Baldy last year when she saw a circle of beachgoers on their knees halfway up the hulking sand dune.
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