Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sand fountain


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete; no prejudice to recreation of a sourced article that demonstrates the subject's notability. Black Falcon (Talk) 04:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Sand fountain

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Non-notable curious phenomenon. Sole source is a YouTube video and we all know how reliable these are. In fact I have had no luck in finding serious discussion about it so for all we know, the video might be a fake or the phenomenon might be simply man-made for one purpose or another. Pichpich (talk) 05:41, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. I wrote to a Saudi Arabian geologist and received the following reply: The fountain you mentioned in Al-Hasa was (to my understanding) simply a water pipe that has broken beneath the sand dune and the sands flown up as you have seen in the video. Rocky143 (talk) 13:21, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. This "sand fountain" is not a sand boil/sand blow/sand volcano triggered by an earthquake. In those features, a layer of sand below a competent layer of soil is liquefied by being shaken by an earthquake.  The wet sand is thixotropic, see  Thixotropy.  When the shaking stops, the sand solidifies again, and thus, cannot continue flowing after the earthquake.  (I have a Ph.D. in geology.)Rocky143 (talk) 22:14, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. Can't find anything reliable even about the video. (Oddly, a recent issue of Nature had a paper on how little we know about the movement of sand.) --Dhartung | Talk 06:48, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Sand Boils. I think this happens when there are earthquakes. I haven't seen one but descriptions found in the net seems to suggest that it might look like a fountain. -- Lenticel ( talk ) 07:47, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Photo of a sand boil. I don't think they're sufficiently identical ... --Dhartung | Talk 08:09, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Sand boils aren't as dramatic as the Arabic fountain but your cite says that the boils "look like a water fountain with insufficient pressure". -- Lenticel ( talk ) 12:19, 15 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep I suppose that coverage of this is in arabic and so difficult to find with an ordinary search. The source seems to be a good one - a picture is worth a thousand words. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:58, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment a picture from YouTube is worth a lot less. Pichpich (talk) 13:18, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. Translating Sand Fountain into Arabic with Google yields "نافوره الرمال" which in turn gets over 6,000 ghits (more than "sand fountain"). IMHO we need an Arabic speaker here to comment on the refs. Annamonckton (talk) 16:22, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment yes, it would be good to get input from an Arabic speaker but if you actually go through the first two or three pages of these Ghits in Arabic, you'll see that almost all of them are internet forums, many which are simply pointing to the YouTube video. Again, we are looking for reliable sources. Pichpich (talk) 16:59, 15 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Seems an interesting phenomenom but is it notable? Lack of coverage suggests not though I concede that much might be written in Arabic. --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 16:54, 15 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment I'm finding useful results searching for "sand geyser", particularly this Martian phenomenon that they may explain. Earth has them too. The resulting geological feature may be a sand volcano, but I haven't confirmed that. I can't confirm that the video is really the same thing. In any case we may be able to collate enough for a sand geyser article that does not include the video. --Dhartung | Talk 18:58, 15 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep In the New Madrid earthquake there were numerous sand blows, or sand volcanoes, as they were called then, the results of which were logged and photographed by the US Geological Surveygovernment over a century later, as documented at and at . The phenomena of sand blows or sand volcanoes in major earthquakes has been studied and documented and an article on these is highly appropriate. The present article might need some improvement, but it does not need deletion. Edison (talk) 18:54, 16 March 2008 (UTC) Delete The phenomenon I was referring to is covered at Sand volcano. This articles subject seems less notable. Edison (talk) 18:56, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Sand boils and Sand volcano are badly in need of a merge. Edison (talk) 18:58, 16 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.