Anakin Skywalker didn’t like sand very much. To quote the pre-Clone Wars padawan: “It’s coarse and rough and irritating” (snicker, the irony!) “and it gets everywhere.”
So perhaps Annie wouldn’t mind that his old stomping grounds, the beggardly Tatooine village of Mos Espa, is in the midst of a maelstrom of mountainous sand dunes. He may, however, be a little miffed to learn that the Tunisian movie set is helping researchers get new perspective on the phenomena known as barchans, large sand formations that resemble mountains shifting in the wind.
As The Atlantic points out, the fictional constructs of Star Wars have provided a very real and much-needed point of fixture from which to study how sand moves against itself.