Nitty-gritty Details on Sand

You might think sand is beige— 1 and boring. But sand comes in every color. The black sand in Hawaii and Santorini has volcanic minerals mixed into it. Bermuda’s pink beaches get their color from the red and pink shells of tiny marine creatures. Even rarer is green sand, whose color comes from the mineral olivine; only a handful of beaches have enough of it to appear distinctly green. And on Rainbow Beach in Australia, the sand appears in more than 70 colors.

Sand can taste good. We think 2 of it as the blanket covering a beach, but technically sand is

any material made up of grains measuring six one-hundredths of a millimeter to two millimeters in diameter. With that definition, salt and sugar qualify.

The stuff on the

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shores can come from a variety of sources, including from the poop of parrotfish, which eat algae and dead coral and excrete hundreds of pounds of sand a year. Sound gross? Perhaps, but the sand that comes out of parrotfish is what you’ll find on some of Hawaii’s most beautiful white sand beaches.

Still, most sand

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comes from granulated rocks that streams carry to the sea—some three billion tons of it each year.

Yet we use 50 billion tons of sand around the world annually, to make paper, paint, and the silicon chips that power computers. It’s also in construction materials such as concrete, brick, and glass.

Depending on

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what’s in it, sand must be heated to more than 2,500 degrees F to become glass. The oldest (and fastest) glassmaker is lightning. When a bolt strikes dry sand, it instantly melts and fuses the sand into hollow branching glass tubes.

Not all sand is

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suitable for building. Desert sand is too smooth for the grains to lock together. Saudi Arabia, with all of its desert, has to import sand in order to build its cities. With much of the world urbanizing, the demand for sand has skyrocketed. Sand extraction is a billion-dollar industry worldwide.

People steal sand;

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there’s even a sand mafia in India.

It’s illegal to take sand from any beach in Hawaii, though many tourists still do. Swiping sand from the Italian island of Sardinia could land you in jail.

When you lie on

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the beach, you’re lounging on someone’s living room. Most of the creatures who call sand home are microscopic. There are as many as a million of them in just a square meter of sand, though altogether they weigh less than a tenth of an ounce. On the other end of the spectrum, larger animals such as sea turtles lay their eggs in sand. Not all of them hatch, and those that don’t hatch provide nutrients for the plant life that grows in the dunes.

Some of our

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country’s notable sand dunes are in states with little or no coastline. Indiana has only 45 miles of shoreline, but the Indiana Dunes National and State Parks welcome about as many visitors a year as Yellowstone. At more than 700 feet high, the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado are the nation’s tallest. Bring a board and you can “surf” them.