Yardang geometries in the Qaidam Basin and their controlling factors

The hyperarid Qaidam Basin features extensive fields of yardangs (covering an area of ~ 40,000km2) sculpted in tectonically folded sedimentary rocks. We extracted the geometries of 16,749 yardangs, such as length-to-width ratio (L/W), spatial density, and spacing, from multi-source remote sensing data provided by Google Earth™. We classified the yardangs into four types based on their L/W: short-axis (1–2), whale-back (2–6), hogsback (6–10) and...