A Moving Desert in France

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The Great Dune of Pyla, located 60 km from Bordeaux in the Arcachon Bay area, France, happens to be the tallest sand dune in Europe. it is a famous tourist destination with more than one million visitors per year.

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Interestingly, the dune is relentlessly moving inwards, slowly pushing the forest back to cover houses, roads and even portions of the Atlantic Wall. The rate of movement is discontinuous; sometimes it moves fast (10 meter in a year) and sometimes very slow (less than a meter). During the last 57 years, the dune has moved some 280 meter giving an annual displacement of 4.9 meter per year.

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This migration of the Great Dune has covered nearly twenty private properties, and each year the sand of the east slope of the dune covers 8000 square meter of the surrounding pine forest. At the North East part of the dune, a road was overlapped in 1987 after an avalanche of sand, and buried in 1991.

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Keywords: tourist places, Great Dune of Pyla, moving desert, beautiful places