# @nasa on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DcRWTL-GVvA
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/69358649-nasa-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/619cb7cdc2.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20T17:55:50.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** NASA (@NASA) — https://gondola.cc/NASA

## Caption

A "desert" made by water 🌊

At first glance, Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil looks like a desert, but it's definitely not: The park gets about 125 centimeters of rain per year. That's slightly more than Seattle and double what falls in London!

What you see here are rows of sparkling white quartz dunes, some stretching 30 meters over a mosaic of blue and green freshwater lagoons. The dune field exists because of a rare coming together of geology and climate.

Rivers deliver the key ingredient – quartz sand – to this unusually flat portion of the Maranhão coastline in massive quantities. It has accumulated here over the past few hundred thousand years, driven in part by changes in sea levels and changes in how much land the sea covers.

Credit: NASA
 
#NASA #Earth #Sand #Brazil

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## Tags

earth, nasa, sand, brazil

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