The birthplace of Darth Vader is about to be consumed by a massive sand dune, and a team of scientists couldn't be more happy about it.

This isn't some kind of commentary on the geomorphologists' part about the quality of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, though. For them, the sand dune bearing down on Mos Espa — the fictional Tatooine town that was constructed in the Tunisian desert — is the opportunity of a lifetime to study how these huge sand dunes, called barchans, move through the desert.

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When sand dunes migrate across the desert, pushed long by the winds, it tends to look like waves on the ocean. However, barchans are a bit more 'individualistic' about their migration. They are massive sand mounds that sweep along, with a crescent-shaped leading edge, and a wedge-shaped 'tail'. Geomorphologists — scientists who study how landscapes change due to wind, water, etc — study the movement of barchans, but it's usually very difficult to do so because how quickly desert landscapes change.

"Dunes often appear in vast sand seas where not only can it be difficult to tell one dune from another, but there may be no fixed reference point against which to measure the dune's position." study co-author Ralph Lorenz, from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, wrote in a Planetary Society blog post.

The buildings of Mos Espa are a perfect point of reference, though, and this dune being right on the cusp of sweeping through the town is a perfect opportunity for the scientists to track its movement.

If it's difficult to see the barchan in image above, here's a map from the study, showing the dune and various buildings and locations:

The barchan was moving at a rate of about 15 metres per year for most of their observations, but that rate apparently slowed down in more recent years. Still, with the dune only metres away from the town now, it won't be long before the town is swallowed up.

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According to the study, the Repro Haddada site, used as the set where Anakin worked on his podracer, was consumed by a different barchan in 2004, and most of the set was destroyed.

A similar fate is likely due for Mos Espa. If the barchan looming at the town's outskirts doesn't destroy it, the much larger one following right behind will probably finish the job in about 80 years.



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