A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
whaleback
A whaleback is a long, smooth rounded ridge of rock or sand shaped like the back of a surfacing whale. In glaciated country, it is a mass of bedrock scoured by ice into a streamlined mound, smoothed on both ends rather than plucked steep at one, which distinguishes it from a roche moutonnée. In sand, it is an enormous elongated dune, sometimes a hundred miles long, carrying smaller dunes on its surface.
Etymology
The English name is a plain comparison made in several fields independently, and it also names a type of Great Lakes bulk carrier built in the 1890s with a rounded deck designed to shed water, which looked exactly like its name and is why the term is familiar in the American Midwest.
Notes
The glacial form is a directional indicator: The long axis records the way the ice flowed. The desert form, sometimes called a draa, is the largest dune structure there is, and the smaller dunes riding on it move while the whaleback itself may be effectively fixed, having taken tens of thousands of years to accumulate.