Ralph Alger Bagnold

Ralph Alger Bagnold was a British scientist and desert explorer born April 3, 1896, in Plymouth, Devon, England, who died May 28, 1990, at Hither Green, London, and who served in the British Army Royal Engineers and Royal Corps of Signals before working in the Department of Civil Engineering at Imperial College London. He pioneered the study of wind driven sand transport and dune formation, founding aeolian geomorphology as a discipline through field observation, experiment, and physical equations, producing the dimensionless Bagnold number and the Bagnold formula for characterizing sand flow, and also researched singing sands and particle suspension in fluids; NASA later named the Bagnold Dunes on Mars in his honor. During the Second World War he founded and commanded the Long Range Desert Group from 1940 to 1941. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944, made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1941, and received the G. K. Warren Prize in 1969, the Penrose Medal in 1970, and the Wollaston Medal in 1971.