{"id":1489,"date":"2011-12-15T09:23:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-15T14:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/?page_id=1489"},"modified":"2024-10-09T14:11:26","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T18:11:26","slug":"naturalists-notebook-sand-hold-a-mountain-in-your-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/naturalists-notebook-sand-hold-a-mountain-in-your-hand\/","title":{"rendered":"Naturalist’s Notebook: Sand: Hold a Mountain in Your Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
Sand…we play in it, we stroll on it, we make castles out of it, we spread our beach towels on it. But what do we really know about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines sand as “loose, gritty particles of worn or disintegrated rock, varying in size from about 1\/16 mm to 2 mm in diameter, usually deposited along the shores of bodies of water, in river beds, or in deserts.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most people use the term sand to refer to loose material on a beach, but sand is actually a grain size measurement used by geologists to describe sediments. The scale runs from smallest to largest, from clay to boulders, with silt, sand, gravel, pebbles and cobbles in between. And to make matters more complex, sand varies from very fine to very coarse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, where does sand come from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n