We simulated the climate of Frank Herbert's Arrakis with an actual climate model! On this page we visualised the climate model output for two scenarios:

First, we looked at the dry desert planet as it is described in the "Dune" series of novels by Frank Herbert, which begins in 10,191 after the guild (~23,000 AD). You can find out whether humans could actually survive here in our original article on The Conversation.

However, Arrakis once had oceans covering 91% of the planet long ago in its history until some ancient catastrophe and invasive sand trouts led to its desertification. The second globe shows the climate of Arrakis roughly 50 million years earlier, when it was still a lush, ocean-covered world. All other parameters in the model are exactly the same. The resulting changes in the climate and habitability of this vastly different world are discussed our new article in The Conversation (TBA).