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Calvin University creating 1,250 ton sand dune on campus

On Tuesday, about 1,250 tons of sand were delivered to the university’s campus, according to a press release from the school.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich — Calvin University announced that it will be creating its very own sand dune on campus.

On Tuesday, about 1,250 tons of sand were delivered to the university’s campus, according to a press release from the school.

While building a sand dune on campus may sound a little strange, its ultimate purpose will be for research.

“It’s very important that we have hands-on experiences, that we focus on doing science by investigating,” said Deanna van Dijk, professor of geology, geography, and environmental studies at Calvin University and program director for FYRES (First-Year Research in Earth Sciences).

Each September, dozens of Calvin students travel to the Lake Michigan dunes for research. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this kind of travel will not be possible for the fall semester.

“Some ideas, you don’t know where they come from. My mind went ‘well we are trying to bring students to the dunes, but could we bring a dune to the students?’” van Dijk said. “It seemed like a really crazy idea, and I knew that to make that work it would be an awful lot of sand to place somewhere on campus.”

On Tuesday, over a thousand tons of sand were delivered to the east side of Calvin’s campus. On Wednesday, the sand will be spread and given an artificial dune shape until the wind pushes it into a natural shape.

“We can do experiments that we can’t do on the real dunes, and we will be able to watch our research site—we can get out there more frequently,” said van Dijk. 

“Creativity and problem solving is what we do in science. Two or three years from now, we will look at all that we’ve learned, and we will know that we can rise to other challenges because we practiced it here.”

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