There is a strange beauty at the heart of every mystery, and the mystery of the Carolina Bays is an enigma that is lushly, uniquely beautiful. How did these odd geomorphological features come to be formed in the landscape in the first place, with their uniform shapes and matching elliptical orientations scattered across the Carolinas? There are many hypotheses but no definitive answers. Why are these inland phenomena even called "bays?" There is no clear answer to that either. The best definition of these features are "temporary, isolated freshwater wetlands," variously described as "high or flatwater ponds, wet weather lakes, or vernal pools," often identified more accurately as "pocosins," and they are ecological wonders, full of all manner of amphibians and reptiles, insects and birds, wildlife and plants—many of them exotic and rare. What also defines them is their uncommon beauty. Featuring more than one hundred-fifty color images, Carolina Bays takes you from an aerial perspective of these unusual bays to an on-the-ground safari, from frogs that croak and bark and boom to skinks that skim across the water as if on skis, and on to squawking herons to black-and-yellow polka-dotted caterpillars. There are growling alligators and four hundred-year-old trees and delicate yellow-fringed orchids. Life is found in astounding abundance. These wetlands are unique and almost immeasurably ancient; as is to be expected in the modern world, they are threatened by human intervention. Such diverse habitats and their rich, unmatched biodiversity call out for preservation and restoration. The bays are not only visited and documented by the authors; they make an impassioned case for respecting how important these singular formations are for the health of the planet. You could not find more able guides.

The origin of the Carolina Bays presents a formidable puzzle for geologists and astronomers. The elliptical bays with sandy rims look like they were made by huge impacts, but they do not have the characteristic markers associated with extraterrestrial impacts. The dates of the terrain on which the bays are found span millennia, forcing scientists to conclude that the bays must have been made by the action of wind and water over the last 140,000 years. A new geometrical survey has found that the Carolina Bays are perfect ellipses with similar width-to-length ratios as the Nebraska rainwater basins. This book starts from the premise that if the Carolina Bays are conic sections, they must have originated from oblique conical cavities that were transformed by geological processes to their current form. Mathematical analysis following this line of reasoning provides clues supporting the idea that the Earth was hit during the ice age by an extraterrestrial object. The impact may have triggered the Younger Dryas cold event and caused the extinction of the North American megafauna and the Clovis culture. The Carolina Bays are the remodeled remains of oblique conical craters formed on viscous ground by secondary impacts of glacier ice boulders ejected from the primary impact site.

Inland sand dunes are widespread in North America and are found from the North Slope of Alaska to the Sonoran Desert in northern Mexico and from the Delmarva Peninsula in the east to Southern California in the west. In this edited book, we highlight recent research on areas of inland dunes that span a range from those that are actively accumulating in current conditions of climate and sediment supply to those that were formed in past conditions and are now degraded relict systems. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of physical geography, geomorphology, environmental sciences, and earth sciences. Contributions include detailed analyses of individual active dune systems at White Sands, New Mexico; Great Sand Dunes, Colorado; and the Laurentian Great Lakes; as well as the vegetation-stabilized dunes of the Nebraska Sand Hills and the Colorado Plateau. Additional chapters discuss the widespread partially vegetated dune systems of the central and southern Great Plains; the relict dunes of the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the eastern USA; and active and stabilized dunes of the Colorado Plateau and the southwestern deserts of the USA and northern Mexico.