Ralph Bagnold was an extraordinary geologist, desert explorer, soldier and inventor. He completed his schooling at Malvern College and after leaving in 1914 he attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. After graduating from Woolwich Bagnold was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and spent three years in the trenches of France during WWI. He received the Belgian Order of Leopold in 1919 for his service, the oldest and highest order of Belgium. After the war Bagnold was then able to continue his studies at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining his masters in Engineering in 1920 before resuming active service with the British Army under the Royal Corps of Signals. Bagnold then served in Cairo and India, utilising his leave to explore the surrounding deserts and developing pioneering equipment and techniques for desert navigation, such as the eponymous Bagnold Sun Compass. In 1931 Bagnold staged the first recorded East-to-West 3000 mile, five week crossing of the Libyan Desert where he undertook extensive research in the field of Aeolian processes. In 1935 he received the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for Exploration in the Libyan desert, and he later published the revolutionary book The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, which helped establish the discipline of aeolian geomorphology. This work was critical for NASA in their study of the terrain of Mars, and they even named the Bagnold Dunes on Mars after him. With the outbreak of WWII Bagnold’s specialist desert expertise proved invaluable as he was able to form the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) in 1940 which operated as a behind-the-lines reconnaissance, espionage and raiding unit. Bagnold was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1941 for distinguished services in the Middle East. After retiring from the British Army in 1944, Bagnold was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and continued to work in the field of geological science, publishing academic papers into his nineties.