AEolian Action

AEolian Action, the action of wind (so called from AEolus, god of winds), one of the minor agencies in geology. The transporting action of wind forms the shifting sand-dunes along the coast and the sand-storms in the desert, burying buildings or obstructing streams. To it is also attributed the accumulation of the loess in the interior of continents, as in China, and in the great plains west of the Mississippi, a fine-grained dust containing few land-plants or shells, and sometimes hundreds of feet thick. By blowing sand, wind exercises an erosive power, varying with the square of its velocity, which seems to have produced the undercutting of some sandstone rocks, such as the Toad Rock, Rusthall, near Tunbridge Wells, and the buttes of the Colorado deserts.