Three regimes of granular avalanches in fluids are put in light depending on the Stokes number St which prescribes the relative importance of grain inertia and fluid viscous effects, and on the grain/fluid density ratio r. In gas (r ≫ 1 and St > 1, e.g., the dry case), the amplitude and time duration of avalanches do not depend on any fluid effect. In liquids (r ∼ 1), for decreasing St, the amplitude decreases and the time duration increases, exploring an inertial regime and a viscous regime. These regimes are described by the analysis of the elementary motion of one grain. Granular matter has received much attention from physicists over the past few years [1]. Beyond the fundamental interest in the physics of granular systems which can present some features of either solids, liquids or even gases, the understanding of granular materials is essential in many industrial activities such as pharmacology, chemical engineering, food, agriculture, and so on. Many studies concern the avalanches that may arise on the slope of a granular pile in air. Such granular avalanches occur in various places in Nature, from small scale, as for the building of any sand pile, to large scale, as the event observed after the Mont St-Helen eruption in 1980. Two angles can be defined when building a pile: the maximum angle of stability θ m at which an avalanche starts and the angle of repose θ r at which the avalanche stops. Between these two angles is a region of bistability where the grains can either be flowing ("liquid state") or at rest ("solid state"). Many experiments performed with dry grains in a rotating cylinder [2,3,4,5,6] showed clearly the existence of these two angles.To date, no detailed study has focused on the influence of the interstitial fluid for a totally immersed grain assembly. This influence is certainly important in granular avalanche processes, as evidenced by the marked differences observed by geologists between subaqueous and eolian cross strata [7]. As a matter of fact, the propagation of subaqueous dunes differs in general from the propagation of eolian dunes even if the slope angles are quite similar: When the transport rate of sand particles is large enough, the flow is continuous in the lee side of the structure in the immersed case, but occurs by successive avalanches in the dry case [7]. This observation prompted geologists to accumulate data on avalanches of sand or beads in rotating drums filled with air or water [8] or even with glycerol mixtures [9], that seemed to show that the amplitude of avalanches decreases and the time duration increases with the fluid viscosity. We have performed an extensive series of experiments to investigate the influence of the interstitial fluid on the packing stability and the avalanche dynamics. The analysis of our results obtained with a rotating drum set-up indicate the existence of three regimes: (i) a free-fall regime for which there is no fluid influence and that corresponds to the classical dry regime, and two regimes where the interstitial fluid governs the a...

Earth's sand seas (dune fields) experience winds that blow with different strengths and from different directions in line with the seasons. In response, dune fields show a rich variety of shapes, from crescentic barchans to star and linear dunes. These dunes commonly exhibit complex and compound patterns with a range of length scales and various orientations, which up to now have remained difficult to relate to wind cycles. Here, we develop a model for dune orientation that explains the coexistence of bedforms with different alignments in multidirectional wind regimes. This model derives from subaqueous experiments, which show that a single bidirectional flow regime can lead to two different dune orientations depending on sediment availability, i.e., the erodibility of the bed. Sediment availability selects the overriding mechanism for the formation of dunes: increasing in height from the destabilization of a sand bed (with no restriction in sediment availability) or elongating in a finger on a nonerodible surface from a localized sand source. These mechanisms drive the dune orientation. Therefore, dune alignment maximizes dune orthogonality to sand fluxes in the bed instability mode, while dunes are aligned with the mean sand transport direction in the fingering mode. Applied to Earth's deserts, the model quantitatively predicts the orientation of rectilinear dunes and their superimposed patterns. This field study suggests that many linear dunes on Earth elongate from sources, and are simply aligned with the mean sand transport direction.