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Saturday 21 October 2017

Sand

Sand is a mixture of loose grains of different rocks or minerals such as granite, quartz and sand stone.

Close-up (1×1 cm) of sand from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. By Siim Sepp

Sand consists chiefly of quartz but owes its varying color to its mixtures of other minerals.

There are seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand in the world, according to mathematicians at the University of Hawaii.

Beach sand is crucial in the process of mixing concrete and the construction industry uses billions of tons of the granular material every year. Desert sand has the wrong chemical composition for construction.

Sand is the second most used natural resource worldwide, after fresh water.

Sand is a non-renewable resource, and its world supplies are beginning to dwindle. Beach sand suitable for making concrete is in increasingly high demand.

Handprint in beach dand

Saudi Arabia imports sand from Australia.

Sand from the Sahara is blown by the wind all the way to the Amazon, recharging its minerals. The desert literally fertilizes the rain forest.

4% of the sand in Normandy today is made up of metal particles from D-Day.

The most common type of black sand is made of volcanic minerals and lava fragments, like at Punaluu Beach, in Hawaii.


At the southern tip of the island of Hawaii, there is a green sand beach. Most beaches are made of quartz, however, the beaches of Hawaii are made almost entirely from smoothed shells. The green sand comes from the material, olivine.

There are thirty places on Earth where sand dunes can "sing," producing sounds and vibrations when the wind moves their sand particles.

Trains have sandboxes which dispense sand immediately in front of the drive wheels to give the locomotive traction on steep or slippery rails.

The town of Sandwich in South East England took its name from Saxon words meaning 'sandy place'.

Source: Thoughtco

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