Dunes occur not only in arid regions, but also wherever loose sand lies unprotected by vegetation from the wind.  From the beaches of sea and lake shores the wind drives inland the surface sand left dry between tides and after storms, piling it in dunes which may invade forests and fields and bury villages beneath their slowly advancing waves.  On flood plains during summer droughts river deposits are often worked over by the wind; the sand is heaped in hummocks and much of the fine silt is caught and held by the forests and grassy fields of the bordering hills.

The sand of shore dunes differs little in composition and the shape of its grains from that of the beach from which it was derived.  But in deserts, by the long wear of grain on grain as they are blown hither and thither by the wind, all soft minerals are ground to powder and the sand comes to consist almost wholly of smooth round grams of hard quartz.

Some marine sandstones, such as the St. Peter sandstone of the upper Mississippi valley, are composed so entirely of polished spherules of quartz that it has been believed by some that their grains were long blown about in ancient deserts before they were deposited in the sea.

Dust deposits.  As desert sands are composed almost wholly of quartz, we may ask what has become of the softer minerals of which the rocks whose disintegration has supplied the sand were in part, and often in large part, composed.  The softer minerals have been ground to powder, and little by little the quartz sand also is worn by attrition to fine dust.  Yet dust deposits are scant and few in great deserts such as the Sahara.  The finer waste is blown beyond its limits and laid in adjacent oceans, where it adds to the muds and oozes of their floors, and on bordering steppes and forest lands, where it is bound fast by vegetation and slowly accumulates in deposits of unstratified loose yellow earth.  The fine waste of the Sahara has been identified in dredgings from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taken hundreds of miles from the coast of Africa.

Loess.  In northern China an area as large as France is deeply covered with a yellow pulverulent earth called loess (German, loose), which many consider a dust deposit blown from the great Mongolian desert lying to the west.  Loess mantles the recently uplifted mountains to the height of eight thousand feet and descends on the plains nearly to sea level.  Its texture and lack of stratification give it a vertical cleavage; hence it stands in steep cliffs on the sides of the deep and narrow trenches which have been cut in it by streams.

On loess hillsides in China are thousands of villages whose eavelike dwellings have been excavated in this soft, yet firm, dry loam.  While dust falls are common at the present time in this region, the loess is now being rapidly denuded by streams, and its yellow silt gives name to the muddy Hwang-ho (Yellow River), and to the Yellow Sea, whose waters it discolors for scores of miles from shore.