non sports, but I thought serious enough to post.
MCMLVTopps
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This lady was impaled by a blown away beach umbrella. She bled out in 40 seconds, had to be a horrible sight. We've all gone to the beach, I for one have seen more than one umbrella not secured in the sand and blown around a bit. So, a nice day on the beach turned into a nightmare. They make cheap beach anchors, the deeper the better, it obviously just takes one gust to end your life.
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I read about that and definitely have seen umbrellas flying across the sand, nice reminder for people Al
Tragic story
Terrible story......you never know...
In my neck of the woods a man died on the beach last week on Hutchinson Island from a sand dune that collapsed on him while he was recording the sunrise and in effect suffocated him to death. So as Hydrant said you never know.
That is a shocking story, I am hoping to go to Myrtle Beach sometime in the near future, I love that place, I'm going to be extra careful.
holy cow. that is a terrible story. such a shame
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
The Mystery of Why This Dangerous Sand Dune Swallowed a Boy
When a boy suddenly disappeared into a sand dune, a scientist embarked on a quest to find out where he went
Erin Argyilan was wrapping up a scientific study of wind speeds on Mount Baldy last year when she saw a circle of beachgoers on their knees halfway up the hulking sand dune. They appeared to be digging frantically.
It had been a gorgeous afternoon: sunny, mid-70s. All day, a breeze had rolled off Lake Michigan and up the dune’s rumpled face. Rising 126 feet off the beach, Mount Baldy is one of the tallest lakefront dunes in the world and the most popular attraction at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a national park that straggles for 15 miles along the industrial southern shore of Lake Michigan, between Gary and Michigan City, Indiana.
For many of the park’s two million yearly visitors, the grueling hike up Baldy’s slip-sliding slope—and the dead run down—is a rite of passage. But on that July afternoon, Argyilan, an athletic 38-year-old geoscientist at Indiana University Northwest, who was then seven months pregnant with her first child, sensed that something was amiss. She strode up to the site of the commotion and saw a man in swim trunks clawing at the sand. “He’s here,” the man kept saying. “He’s right here.” His wife, who appeared to be in shock, was calling out to God. Their 6-year-old son, they said, had vanished down a hole.
Argyilan saw no sign of an opening or even upturned sand, which you’d expect if someone had dug a hole. As for natural cavities, dunes aren’t supposed to have any. Unlike hard rock, which can dissolve to form caverns and sinkholes, dunes are just big piles of sand formed as wind stacks one grain atop the next.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Argyilan told a pair of fieldworkers from the National Park Service, who’d been helping lug around her 45-pound wind meter. Someone had called 911, and soon police and firefighters were clambering over Baldy’s crest with shovels.
Argyilan, a former CrossFit trainer with a nose stud and shoulder tattoo, was no milquetoast. As Hurricane Sandy bore down the October before, she’d summited Baldy in ski goggles to record the erosional brawn of the winds and waves. The sand-laced 50-mile-per-hour gusts scoured the numbers off her surveying rod. But now, as park brass arrived to coordinate an emergency response, Argyilan kept a cool distance. She scanned Baldy’s taupe slopes, sure the boy was just hiding somewhere. At 6 p.m., almost two hours after his disappearance, she packed up her wind meter and drove home.
He’ll turn up, she told herself.
For dinner that night, Argyilan, her fiancé and her father went to a nearby Applebee’s. As they finished their meal, the restaurant’s TV screens flashed with news from Baldy: After a three-and-a-half hour search involving 50 rescuers and a pair of construction-site excavators, the boy was found a dozen feet beneath the dune’s surface. He had no pulse or breath at first, and his sand-encrusted body was ice-cold.
“I felt absolutely shattered,” Argyilan remembers. Everything she knew about geology—all the courses she’d taken, all the papers she’d read over years of study—told her this couldn’t happen. But her science had led her astray.
She sobbed on the way home, and spent a sleepless night on the couch, hunting online for any reports of similar cases. She scolded herself for not digging alongside the father. As a mom-to-be, she wished she’d tried to comfort the boy’s mother. Worst of all, though, was a recurring thought: “If they had listened to me, they wouldn’t have kept looking.”
We live in an era when the robotic arms of unmanned spaceships can scoop sand on Mars, then phone home across millions of miles to tell us its chemistry. Yet here, in the well-traveled regions of Earth, on the very ground we walk, we are still being surprised by geologic mystery.
In California’s Death Valley, “sailing stones” cruise the desert floor under a locomotion that science struggled for decades to explain. In Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, a patch of permafrost snapped earlier this year into a gaping crater, a previously unrecorded phenomenon.
Mount Baldy stands out even in this rogues’ gallery. It lazes not in some far-flung badlands, but in the temperate Midwest, on a popular beach an hour’s drive from Chicago.
Mount Baldy began to take shape 4,500 years ago, when the water level in Lake Michigan dropped about 20 feet, exposing vast fields of sand to the will of the wind. Before last year’s incident, the dune had intrigued scientists not because it defied any principles of windblown sand, but because it followed them all too enthusiastically. Most dunes on the Indiana lakeshore are forested. But Baldy is a “blowout”: a victim of some ancient force—a violent storm, a dramatic change in wind direction—that scalped the dune of the plants and trees whose roots once held it in place. And like an animal freed from its cage, Baldy began to roam.
Combining painstaking physical measurements with an analysis of aerial photographs, Zoran Kilibarda, a colleague of Argyilan’s at IU Northwest, discovered that the dune had rolled nearly 440 feet inland between 1938 and 2007. It had buried trails and a staircase, and stands of black oak, 60- to 80-feet tall, that had long stood between Baldy’s bottom edge and the parking lot. In March 2007, as the first of Kilibarda’s figures came in, stunned park officials called Baldy’s pace “alarming,” warning that it could bury its own parking lot within seven years. They banned the public from its steep inland side, or slipface; footfalls were thought to be accelerating its advance. But Baldy refused to be tamed.
Argyilan wasn’t a Baldy expert, per se; for her dissertation at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she’d analyzed buried beach sand to chart water level shifts in the Great Lakes. But as a specialist in coastal geology at a nearby university, she, like Kilibarda, soon found herself under Baldy’s spell.