The Permian Basin is bounded on the east, north, and west by cratonic platforms which also received shallow-water marine, eolian (wind-driven), and fluvial (stream-driven) sediments.
These arkoses are generally well sorted and rounded (supermature) and show other desert features, such as eolian cross-beds, associated gypsum, and other evaporitic minerals.
Cratonic shelf sedimentation in low paleolatitudes during Permian time was characterized by the gradual withdrawal of shorelines and the progressive increase in eolian (wind-transported) sands, red beds, and evaporites.
Sand sources along the ancestral Rocky Mountains supplied eolian sand and silt in great quantities.
Anabatic (upward-moving) winds produce extensive eolian erosion.
Eolian erosion results in scattered large sand dunes.
For example, deserts export dust by eolian means, and the resulting deposits modify soil profiles in downwind regions, as in the eastern United States, or create actual depositional landforms of loess, as in Shansi Province of China on the lee of the Ordos Desert.
It seems likely that the excess iron in the early oceans was finally cleared out by about 1.7 billion years ago, and this decrease in the deposition of iron formations resulted in an appreciable rise in the oxygen content of the atmosphere, which in turn enabled more eolian red beds to form.
There are broad expanses of badlands, eolian (wind-produced) relief, and karst topography (limestone terrain associated with vertical and underground drainage).
Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in "The Eolian Harp" (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as "Religious Musings" and "The Destiny of Nations".
Eolian caves are chambers scoured by wind action.
