ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Sandball genesis from raindrops.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
In the water cycle, erosion begins with the entrainment of soil by raindrops. The discrete, discontinuous, and three-phase nature of raindrop erosion-at the boundary of fluid and granular mechanics-makes this problem particularly challenging, compared to better-studied sediment transport by river and wind currents. Past research has emphasized particle entrainment by raindrop splash at impact. Here, we report lab and field observations, that uncover a surprisingly rich and efficient postimpact phase. Raindrops impacting a dry, sloping, granular bed spontaneously form "sandballs;" drops of dense suspensions that can grow in mass to a jammed state by sediment entrainment, as they roll downhill like snowballs and magnify soil erosion. Careful control of drop conditions reveals two stable sandball morphologies: peanut-like shapes linked to hydrodynamic instabilities and toroidal forms that undergo mechanical locking from extreme sediment loading, which have potential implications for related problems in bioengineering, pharmaceuticals, and snow physics.
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