White Sands

Declared in 2019 — one of the most recent national parks in the United States — White Sands protects the largest gypsum dune field in the world, an unusual mineral for dune formations on this scale because it normally dissolves readily in rain. The park borders directly on the White Sands military test range, where in July 1945 the first atomic bomb in history was detonated (the Trinity test), a few kilometres from its dunes.