Oregon Dunes: The Largest Coastal Dune System in North America

The Oregon Dunes stretch forty miles along the coast between Florence and Coos Bay. They are the largest expanse of temperate coastal sand dunes in North America, and they have been moving inland for thousands of years, pushed by prevailing southwest winds off the Pacific.

The dunes are not uniform. The active dune system, closest to the beach, is bare sand, rolling and wind-shaped, with deflation plains where the wind has scoured sand down to the water table and created shallow ponds. Further inland, the dunes transition through a zone of colonizing grasses into stabilized areas where the dune topography is fixed and older forests have grown up over the sand.

European beach grass, introduced in the early twentieth century to stabilize railroad infrastructure along the coast, has significantly altered the dune system. The grass forms dense mats that fix the foredune, the first ridge behind the beach, and prevent the dynamic sand movement that kept the dune system active. The Forest Service has been removing beach grass in sections to try to restore the system's mobility. The dunes have changed; the question is how much of the change is reversible.

Frank Herbert, the author of the novel Dune, visited the Oregon Dunes in the late nineteen fifties while researching an article on the US Department of Agriculture's efforts to stabilize the coastal sand. The landscape stayed with him. The first Dune novel was published in nineteen sixty-five. The Dunes Herbert saw, at an early stage of the beach-grass stabilization project, formed the geological and ecological imagination behind one of the most influential science fiction novels of the twentieth century.