资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Aeolian sand transport drives geophysical phenomena, such as bedform evolution and desertification. Creep plays a crucial, yet poorly understood, role in this process. We present a model for aeolian creep, making quantitative predictions for creep fluxes, which we verify experimentally. We discover that the creep transport rate scales like the Shields number to the power 5/2, clearly different from the laws know for saltation. We derive this 5/2 power scaling law from our theory and confirm it with meticulous wind tunnel experiments. We calculate the creep flux and layer thickness in steady state exactly and for the first time study the relaxation of the flux towards saturation, obtaining an analytic expression for the relaxation time.