INSIGHTS | P E R S P E C T I V E S

Presently there is no societal assessment

in pesticide registration. Recently, a promis-
ing framework for the combination of cost-
benefit analyses with factors such as risk
perception, uncertainty, and trust in regu-
latory decision-making on toxic substances
in food, including pesticides, has been pro-
posed (16). We argue that including such a
framework in pesticide authorization would
be an appropriate way to take factors such
as citizens’ initiatives, societal attitudes to-
ward agricultural chemicals, and economic
benefits of chemical pest and weed control
into account.
In a recent commentary, EFSA’s executive
director, Bernhard Url, called for a broader
societal discussion about the role of modern
agricultural practices to be “framed ahead
of and outside scientific work” (17). We be-
lieve, however, that integration rather than
a separate assessment is the way forward

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to move the discussion away from the pres-
ent binomial decision of whether an indi-
vidual pesticide is safe or unsafe. It is time
for a new scheme for pesticide evaluation
in which regulatory decision-making takes
into account not only the technical evidence
on safety but also the societal context in
PLANETARY SCIENCE
which decisions are made. j
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/
glyphosate_en
Dunes across the Solar System
2. EPA, “Glyphosate. Draft human health risk assessment in
support of registration review” (EPA, Office of Chemical Despite a very thin atmosphere, dunes may form on Pluto
Safety and Pollution Prevention, 2017).
3. Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues, “Joint FAO/WHO
meeting on pesticide residues, Summary report” (FAO,
WHO, Geneva, 2016). By Alexander G. Hayes If Sir Patrick was with us today, New
4. IARC, “Some organophosphate insecticides and
Horizons might have changed his opinion.

PHOTO: NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE/ZLDOYLE

herbicides. Glyphosate (updated 11 August 2016)” (IARC

Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risk to
Humans, vol. 112, IARC, WHO, Lyon, France, 2017).
5. J. V. Tarazona et al., Arch. Toxicol. 91, 2723 (2017).
6. M. Cuhra et al., Front. Environ. Sci. 4, 28 (2016).
7. A. H. C. Van Bruggen et al., Sci. Total Environ. 616–617, 255
(2018).
8. http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/initiatives/
successful/details/2017/000002
9. Communication from the Commission on the European
Citizens’ Initiative, C(2017) 8414, European Commission,
Strasbourg, 2017; http://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/
files/plant/docs/pesticides_glyphosate_eci_final.pdf.
10. R. Mesnage et al., Toxicology 313, 122 (2013).
11. L. Janssens, R. Stoks, Aquat. Toxicol. 193, 210 (2017).
12. C. M. Benbrook, Environ. Sci. Eur. 28, 3 (2016).
13. V. Silva et al., Sci. Total Environ. 621, 1352 (2018).
14. https://echa.europa.eu/support/
socio-economic-analysis-in-reach
15. R. Brouwer et al., Regul. Toxicol. Pharmacol. 68, 438
(2014).
16. C. Graven et al., “Estimation of the socio-economic conse-
quences of regulatory measures on toxic substances in
food. A proposed framework: SEATS” (RIVM Letter Report
2017-0079, National Institute for Public Health and the
Environment, Bilthoven, Netherlands, 2018).
17. B. Url, Nature 553, 381 (2018).
ACKNOWL EDGMENTS
The authors were not involved in glyphosate risk assess-
ment nor have they any relations with parties in the debate
described in this paper. N.M.v.S. is a member of the Netherlands
Commission on Genetic Modification.
10.1126/science.aat0567
B
efore NASA’s New Horizons mission,
the surface of Pluto was shrouded in
mystery. No one knew what to expect
from its surface and most scientists
shied away from detailed specula-
tion, except to say that the one thing
we should expect is to be surprised (1). On
page 992 of this issue, Telfer et al. (2) pres-
ent such a surprise by describing features
interpreted as dunes on Pluto’s surface.
An eloquent, although perhaps dour,
summary of the pre–New Horizons view of
Pluto was given by the amateur astronomer
Sir Patrick Moore in his 1955 book, Guide
to the Planets: “Beyond all doubt, Pluto is
the loneliest and most isolated world in
the Solar System—cut off from its fellows,
plunged in everlasting dusk, silent, barren,
and touched with the chill of death. Nature
seems to have passed it by, and it can never
have known the breath of life. It marks the
frontier of the Sun’s kingdom” (3).
Spacecraft Planetary Imaging Facility, Cornell University, 412
Space Science Building, Ithaca, NY 14853-6801, USA.
Email: hayes@astro.cornell.edu
Although Pluto is indeed isolated, nature
has in no way passed it by. Images from
New Horizons have revealed a geologically
diverse and dynamic world driven by inter-
nal heat, extreme seasons, and sublimating
ices (4). Rather than representing the end
of the Sun’s kingdom, Pluto perhaps repre-
sents the gateway to an unexplored realm
where volatile ices (consisting, for example,
of nitrogen, methane, ammonia, and car-
bon dioxide) dominate the landscapes of
the dwarf planets and irregular bodies that
make up the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons will
provide a close-up view of this realm on
New Year’s Day 2019, when it passes within
3500 km of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.
In the latest discovery from New Hori-
zons, Telfer et al. describe a collection of
regularly spaced, linear ridges on Pluto’s
surface. They interpret these ridges as
transverse dunes of granular methane ice.
The features are oriented orthogonal to
dark wind streaks on Sputnik Planitia, a
vast plain of nitrogen ice near Al-Idrisi Mon-
tes, a collection of large water-ice blocks
with up to 5 km of relief. With this discov-

960 1 JUNE 2018 • VOL 360 ISSUE 6392 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

Published by AAAS
 In this image of Pluto’s surface, the red luminance
corresponds to the infrared data acquired by the
Ralph/MVIC instrument carried by New Horizons.
ery, Pluto joins Earth, Mars, Venus, Titan
(a moon of Saturn), and perhaps even the
comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (5),
demonstrating that the mobilization and
self-organization of granular material into
dunes occur throughout the Solar System
(see the figure). What makes this discovery
surprising is that the sediment can be mo-
bilized despite Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere,
with a surface pressure (1 Pa) that is a factor
of 100,000 times lower than that on Earth.
The processes by which grains are mobi-
lized in a fluid medium have long been stud-
ied in both planetary science and terrestrial
sedimentology. One of the earliest papers
addressing this problem in a tenuous atmo-
sphere was written in 1975 by Carl Sagan
and Ralph Alger Bagnold, who investigated
sediment transport on Mars (6). Despite the
tremendous progress that has been made
on the subject (7), many puzzles remain.
Typical surface winds on Pluto are expected
to be sufficient to transport particles once
lofted, but even the strongest winds driven
by interactions with the nearby Al-Idrisi
Montes are not expected to be sufficient to
PHOTOS: (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) NASA; NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA; GREELEY ET AL. (9); TELFER ET AL. (2); JIA ET AL. (4); NASA/JPL-CALTECH/ASI
begin lofting grains from rest.
To overcome this problem, Telfer et al.
suggest that motion is initiated by the
sublimation of nitrogen ice from Sputnik
Planitia itself. The idea of sublimation-
Dunes everywhere
Similar dune-like patterns have been found on Solar System bodies including planets, moons, and a comet that all have very different gravity,
atmospheric pressures, and sediment types.
0 5
km
Linear star dunes formed by changing winds in the
Rub’ al Khali sand desert on the Arabian Peninsula.
0 30
km
Linear dunes diverted around topographic features in
the Belet dunefield on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
induced lofting has previously been pro-
posed to explain the erosional CO2 troughs
that form spiderlike structures at the south
pole of Mars (8) and the dark streaks on
Neptune’s moon Triton (9). In contrast to
these previous studies, Telfer et al. inti-
mately tie sublimation to dune formation
in a tenuous atmosphere. If an extremely
tenuous atmosphere like that of Pluto can
support the generation of bedforms from
wind-driven sediment, what kind of eolian
activity might we see on places like Io (a
moon of Jupiter) or Triton?
Despite vast differences in gravity, atmo-
spheric pressure, and sediment type, wind-
blown sand dunes on Earth, Mars, Venus
(10), and Titan self-organize into remark-
ably similar landscape patterns (see the
figure) (11). This property of dune pattern
formation aided Telfer et al. and Jia et al. (5)
in identifying candidate dunefields on Pluto
and comet 67P, respectively. However, inter-
preting formative mechanisms and envi-
ronmental conditions from well-organized
patterns alone can be hazardous. Nature
tends to converge toward a set of relatively
few forms and generic patterns using a va-
riety of processes (12). Accordingly, much
work is left to do to understand dunes on
Pluto. Most notably, it remains to be shown
how high the dunes are, when they are most
active, whether they change, and whether
entrainment can occur without lofting (5).
Regardless, Telfer et al. convincingly ar-
gue that lofted granular material entrained
0 20
m km
A crescent-shaped dune with wind ripples in Nili Patera,
one of the most active dunefields on Mars.
0 20
m km
Dune-like patterns in the Hapi region of comet 67P/
Churyumov-Gerasimenko created by thermal winds.
Published by AAAS
in a flow will self-organize into patterns
and—given the right flow regime, deter-
mined by the particle Reynolds number
and Shields stress (13)—those patterns will
be recognizable as dunes. With the require-
ments of a thicker atmosphere for dune
formation relaxed, it is perhaps not that
surprising that dunes appear throughout
the Solar System, so long as there is sedi-
ment and a mechanism to mobilize it. j
RE FERENCES AND NOTES
1. J. M. Moore et al., Icarus 246, 65 (2015).
2. M. W. Telfer et al., Science 360, 992 (2018).
3. P. Moore, Guide to the Planets (Eyre & Spottiswoode,
1955), pp. 174–175.
4. S. A. Stern et al., Science 350, aad1815 (2015).
5. P. Jia, B. Andreotti, P. Claudin, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
114, 2509 (2017).
6. C. Sagan, R. A. Bagnold, Icarus 26, 209 (1975).
7. R. D. Lorenz, J. R. Zimbelman, Dune Worlds: How
Windblown Sand Shapes Planetary Landscapes (Springer,
Berlin/Heidelberg, 2016).
Downloaded from http://science.sciencemag.org/ on May 31, 2018
8. S. Piqueux, S. Byrne, M. I. Richardson, J. Geophys. Res.
Planets 108, 5084 (2003).
9. C. Sagan, C. Chyba, Nature 346, 546 (1990).
10. R. Greeley et al., J. Geophys. Res. Planets 97, 13319 (1992).
11. R. C. Ewing, A. G. Hayes, A. Lucas, Nat. Geosci. 8, 15 (2015).
12. G. Nicolis, I. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An
Introduction (Freeman, 1989).
13. M. P. Lamb, J. P. Grotzinger, J. B. Southard, N. J. Tosca,
in Sedimentary Geology of Mars, J. P. Grotzinger, R. E.
Milken, Eds. (SEPM special publication no. 102, Society for
Sedimentary Geology, 2012), pp. 139–150.
ACKNOWLEDGME NTS
I am grateful to J. Moore, R. Lorenz, R. Ewing, and S. Birch for
helpful discussions and insights during the preparation of this
manuscript.
10.1126/science.aat7488
0 4
Slowly changing dunes formed by gentle surface winds in
the Fortuna-Meshkenet dunefield on Venus.
0 4
Surface features interpreted as dunes in Sputnik Planitia,
a vast plain of nitrogen ice on Pluto.
1 JUNE 2018 • VOL 360 ISSUE 6392 961
Dunes across the Solar System
Alexander G. Hayes

Science 360 (6392), 960-961.

DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7488

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