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Yardang

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

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Definition

Elongated or streamlined hill formed by eolian (wind) erosion of consolidated or semiconsolidated material.

Category

A streamlined type of eolian erosional lineations (Brookes 2001).

Description

A yardang is a fluted aerodynamic feature formed by eolian erosion. It is a wind-abraded elongated ridge-like sharp-crested landform with a steep and broader wind-faced front and a lower and narrower end (Besler 1992). Yardangs often form parallel systems, occasionally carved on a flat surface by wind erosion, oriented longitudinally to the dominant wind (Jackson 1997).

Morphometry

Typical yardangs resemble an inverted boat hull. The downwind end is the “stern,” which may have a sand tail. The upwind end is the “bow.” They range in size from a few m long and 1 m high to several km long and 200 m high on Earth (Greeley and Iversen 1985). Terrestrial yardangs have an ideal aspect ratio (length to width) of about 3:1 (McCauley et al. 1977a) to 4:1 (Ward and Greeley 1984). Mega-yardangs...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Space Science and Engineering, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Rd, 78238, San Antonio, TX, Mexico

    Kathleen Mandt

  2. Department of Earth Sciences (Erdwissenschaften), Institute of Geophysics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Zurich, Switzerland

    Giovanni Leone

Authors
  1. Kathleen Mandt
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  2. Giovanni Leone
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giovanni Leone .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Ames Research Center/NPP, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Henrik Hargitai

  2. Konkoly Thege Miklos Astronomical Institute, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Ákos Kereszturi

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Mandt, K., Leone, G. (2015). Yardang. In: Hargitai, H., Kereszturi, Á. (eds) Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3134-3_575

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