Following in the tracks of the winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics, Pierre Gilles de Gennes, a new generation of researchers have set out to explore this granular material over the last ten years. This research should do more than allow us, eventually, to understand the formidable phenomena that are avalanches and landslides, or the advancing of sand dunes in desertic regions, it can also help the engineers solve the problems in storing and pouring powders and particules that make up the food that we eat, medicine, even roads and buildings…

The Earth’s crust, or mantle, is — putting aside the oceans, and on the enormous scale in play here — also made up of granular material. As the physician Jacques Duran suggests, the physical properties of granular material may also hold the answer about the creation of forms and features like mountains, volcano chains, dunes, or the bends in rivers.