Fuljis: A Discussion

In the late nineteenth century Anne and Wilfrid Blunt described horse-shoe shaped hollows they called fuljis in dunes in the Nafud sandsea of Nejd in Arabia. Since then the term has been sparsely used but investigators have tended to associate these features with coalescing barchans. Examination of images from Google Earth, however, have shown that such hollows are associated with quite a large range of other dune types including star dunes, parabolics, network dunes, and mega-barchanoid ridges. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the term is superfluous, and that such rather neglected features, which deserve further investigation, should simply be called ‘interdunal hollows’.