Geophysical research has long been interdisciplinary, with many phenomena on the Earth's surface involving multiple, linked processes that are best understood using a combination of techniques. This is particularly true in the case of grain flows on sand dunes, in which the sedimentary stratification with which geologists are concerned arises from the granular processes investigated by physicists and engineers, and the water permeation that interests hydrologists and soil scientists determines the seismic velocities of concern to exploration geophysicists. In this dissertation, I describe four projects conducted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, using a combination of laboratory experimentation, fieldwork, numerical simulation, and mathematical modelling to link avalanching on dunes to its effects on stratification, on the permeation of water, and on seismic surveys. Firstly, I describe experiments on erodible, unbounded, grain piles in a channel, slowly supplied with additional grains, and I demonstrate that the behaviour of the consequent, discrete avalanches alternates between two regimes, typified by their size statistics. Reconciling the `self-organised criticality' that several authors have predicted for such a system with the hysteretic behaviour that others have observed, the system exhibits quasi-periodic, system-spanning avalanches in one regime, while in the other avalanches pass at irregular intervals and have a power-law size distribution. Secondly, I link this power-law size distribution to the strata emplaced by avalanches on bounded grain piles. A low inflow rate of grains into an experimental channel develops a pile, composed of strata in which blue-dyed, coarser grains overlie finer grains. Associating stopped avalanche fronts with the `trapped kinks' described by previous authors, I show that, in sufficiently large grain piles, mean stratum width increases linearly with distance downslope. This implies the possibility of interpreting paleodune height from the strata of aeolian sandstones, and makes predictions for the structure of avalanche-associated strata within active dunes. Thirdly, I discuss investigations of these strata within active, Qatari barchan dunes, using dye-infiltration to image strata in the field and extracting samples across individual strata with sub-centimetre resolution. Downslope increases in mean stratum width are evident, while measurements of particle size distributions demonstrate preferential permeation of water along substrata composed of finer particles, explaining the strata-associated, localised regions of high water content discovered by other work on the same dunes. Finally, I consider the effect of these within-dune variations in water content on seismic surveys for oil and gas. Having used high performance computing to simulate elastic wave propagation in the vicinity of an isolated, barchan sand dune, I demonstrate that such a dune acts as a resonator, absorbing energy from Rayleigh waves and reemitting it over an extensive period of time. I derive and validate a mathematical framework that uses bulk properties of the dune to predict quantitative properties of the emitted waves, and I demonstrate the importance of internal variations in seismic velocity, resulting from variations in water content.

Bien que répandus dans l'environnement et dans l'industrie, les écoulements granulaires possèdent des caractéristiques particulières qui sont différentes de celles des écoulements de liquides ordinaires comme l'eau (fluides newtoniens). L'une de ces caractéristiques est de présenter un seuil d'écoulement, il est donc fréquent qu'une des frontières de l'écoulement soit constituée de grains au repos (frontière érodable). L'échange entre les deux états solide et liquide d'un écoulement granulaire est à l'origine du phénomène d'érosion et de déposition et constitue le cœur de cette thèse. Nous y effectuons à la fois des études expérimentales et des études théoriques en nous basant sur les modèles phénoménologiques concernant le taux d'échange proposés par Bouchaud, Cates, Ravi Prakash et Edwards et modifiés par Boutreux et de Gennes. A l'aide d'un dispositif expérimental permettant de lâcher sans vitesse initiale une colonne de grains sur une pente granulaire, nous avons quantifié l'importance relative des phénomènes d'érosion et de déposition notamment en déterminant l'angle neutre qui définit la pente critique pour laquelle ces deux processus s'équilibrent. Dans un deuxième temps nous avons appliqué le modèle proposé par Boutreux et de Gennes au cas de l'étalement d'une « marche » granulaire (marche du Sinaï). / Granular flows, which are common in nature and industry, have particular characteristics that are different from the ordinary flow of liquid (eg. water, oil, etc.) and are not yet well understood in the literature. This case underlines the lack of knowledge on the exchange rate between solid and liquid states of granular flows which is the origin of the erosion - deposition phenomenon and constitutes the core of this thesis. To address the issue of the exchange rate solid - liquid, this work is based mainly in two subjects. The first subject is to study the processes of erosion and deposition of a flow generated by the grains stocked in a reservoir. By releasing naturally with zero-velocity the grains to generate the granular flow, we quantified the relation between the erosion and deposition for determining the neutral angle which defines the slope where these two processes balance. The second subject is to analyze the fall of grains in Sinai step problem by studying the spread of the march. For both works, we conduct not only the experimental but also theoretical studies based on the phenomenological models of the exchange rate proposed by BCRE (Bouchaud, Cates, Ravi Prakash and Edwards) and BDG (Boutreux and de Gennes) with some modifications.