The Dune universe is one of the most compelling fictional realities in the genre. One of the things Frank Herbert was great at was creating the framing elements that make a story’s setting interesting. His technology allowed an impossibly distant future to include age-old political and military ideals without issue. He built an ecological profile of a brutal desert planet that remains engaging. Arrakis lives and breathes in every entry and adaptation, and one of the most critical parts of the ecosystem is the mighty sandworm.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films captured the overwhelming majority of what people love from the original work. They’re excellent sci-fi epics that turn something once thought to be unfilmable into a story that feels like it should have always been on the big screen. Together, the two films deliver so much of the original work. New fans are discovering the depth of the franchise for the first time. The watershed moment might come a few years from now when they experience the Dune sequels for the first time.
How do sandworms affect the conditions on Arrakis?
Arrakis is a notable brutal science fiction environment. It’s an endless desert that would leave an unprepared visitor dead from dehydration within minutes. On the bright side, Arrakis is remarkably similar to Earth in terms of atmosphere. It actually has slightly more oxygen than the planet that birthed the human race. It doesn’t seem possible that a planet with no surface water could have the same atmosphere as one that is 70% covered by it. There are also very few plants on Arrakis, but it still has more than enough oxygen to provide for its citizens. The sandworms of Arrakis provide the oxygen that sustains human life. Sandworms eat sand for sustenance, making them a rare example of autotrophic megafauna. They may sift some form of sand-plankton from the ground, but many believe that they somehow gain nutrition from the desert sands. Whatever process derives fuel from Arrakis’s crust generates incredible heat and energy. This blast furnace-like process generates all the oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere. Without sandworms, humans would be unable to exist on Arrakis without respiratory equipment.
Sandworms did not naturally evolve on Arrakis. They came from a species called sandtrouts, which came to Arrakis from an unknown location some years ago. The sandtrouts that eventually created the sandworms also turned the planet into an unforgiving desert. Arrakis has vast stores of water deep beneath its mountain ranges. They still have some residual moisture in the air to be caught in windsocks. When the sandtrouts arrived, they stored the planet’s surface water in their bodies, gradually growing in size while destroying the water. The sandworms migrated to the deep core, bringing the water with them. This allowed them to undergo the metamorphosis process that would allow them to become sandworms. In many ways, the desert exterior is entirely due to the sandworms. They created the environment that best served their new massive form to the detriment of everything else. Thanks to the sandworms, there are very few other living things on Arrakis. The sandtrout/sandworm cycle created the conditions that turned Arrakis into a desert.
What happens to sandworms?
While ascending to the throne of the Golden Lion Emperor, Paul Atreides promised the Fremen of Arrakis that he would restore the planet to the lush paradise it once was. He could see only a portion of the mythic Golden Path, a potential ideal timeline that would save humanity from extinction. His son, Leto II, took his father’s throne after Paul walked into the desert. Leto truly started the process of terraforming Arrakis. It took thousands of years, but Arrakis gradually became a beautiful world of forests, mountains, and multiple bodies of fresh water. This became hostile to the sandworms, who can only live in the arid desert environments that their progenitors created. This led to the near-extinction of sandworms. The species gradually died out, but Leto II’s Golden Path required additional steps. To quote God Emperor of Dune,
The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less.
Leto II subjected the universe to generations of oppression before he died. He forced humans to live out their lives on their home planet, restricting interstellar travel by nearly eliminating the spice melange. Leto created this policy deliberately, eventually dying on Arrakis to complete his plan. Arrakis was a beautiful environment, but Leto’s death released new sandtrouts into the planet’s water supply, resurrecting the sandworm species. Over the next 1500 years, Arrakis returned to the familiar desert. This, along with the lessons Leto taught through his cruelty, prompted humans to begin the Scattering. They spread throughout the universe, broadening intellectually and physically. Escaping the pull of charismatic messiah-types finally allowed humans to find that Golden Path. The sandworms nearly faced extinction again when the Honored Matres fired an apocalyptic weapon at Arrakis. The surviving Bene Gesserit warriors captured a single sandworm and brought it to their homeworld. It quickly proved its effect on the environment by turning the Bene Gesserit homeworld into a desert.
Sandworms and their creation cycle turned Arrakis into the brutal desert fans know and love. The Fremen often refer to them as The Maker, and that name is extremely accurate. Though they ruin the world, they also provide the oxygen humans need to survive. They make things bad enough to be difficult but barely survivable. Everything on Arrakis comes back to the sandworms.
