Some people may complain that German natural landscape is rather unspectacular. The North Sea and Baltic Sea in the north, some mountains in the south and not so much in between. Well, for those who may think like that I strongly recommend a visit to the… Harz region!

Why is Harz so interesting and why am I writing about it on the Sand Atlas website? The answer is because Harz is maybe one of the most geologically diverse region in Germany with dramatic changes within very small areas (from here the nickname “Classic Geological Square Mile”). Nowadays Harz is a low mountain range stretched over 180 km long and 30 km wide with the highest peak, Brocken, at 1,141 m. Things get more exciting when we look back over several hundreds of millions years ago, when all continents were “glued” together forming one single piece of land called… Pangaea. At this time, Harz was located much closer to Equator than now, somewhere on the actual location of… Cairo. When Pangaea began to split in two super-continents (Gondwana and Laurasia), the water started to fill the gap between them. Also the Harz was covered by water and abundant sediments transported from the vicinity started to pile up on the sea bottom.

Reproduction of the Earth from Late Triassic (about 220 million years ago) showing the separation of Gondwana (in the south) from Laurasia (north) – source: Wikipedia Commons

Further on, various tectonic events caused the creation of faults and uplift movements, exposing the various rock deposits to the surface. Due to their high altitude the new formed mountains were quickly eroded (especially the upper new layers) and the underlying base rock was standing as low mountains. These processes led to the formation of numerous types of sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rock deposits. Among the upper layers, most common are the argilaceous shales (German: Schiefer), greywackes and granite. and from the older ones, limestone and gypsum deposits.

Maybe so far nothing really extraordinary but, as I said before, the true beauty of Harz geological architecture is given by the density and diversity of geological formations. On small areas, massive metal ore deposits are for example accompanied by lignite and salt deposits, limestone beds or dolomite formations. This high availability of minerals and valuable elements gave the region important mining privileges for metal ores (Fe, Mn, Pb, Zn, Ar, Au etc) while the soft calcareous deposits provided the formation of many drip-stone caves and caverns.

During a four-day drive-and-camp trip in Harz we collected several samples and learned a lot about specific geological features. More details about the trip with large descriptions of individual locations are in preparation and will be posted within the next days.

The internet is also full of information about Harz but our preferred website is http://www.harzregion.de. The website is very informative and there you can download 18 leaflets in both German and English language (partly also in French) about the geological landmarks of the region.

The World Atlas of Sands is now available for mobile phones! The mobile theme does have almost all functions of the ‘normal’ one and makes use of a beautiful, user-friendly interface. Reading the articles is now more simple than ever: images are automatically scaled down to fit the screen, the fonts are clearly displayed at the optimum size and the pages are loading very fast. Now you can read your preferred articles while collecting sand on the beach! Just type in your browser the address www.sand-atlas.com and the mobile theme will automatically adapt to your mobile phone display.

Screen shots from the World Atlas of Sands website on iPhone 4.0

Checking the statistics of my website I just discovered how diverse and sometimes funny the search terms can be. Actually lots of visitors are browsing the Sand Atlas directly (either from bookmark or by just typing the www path in the address bar). However, many are landing at www.sand-atlas.com from a google inquiry and it’s really entertaining to look through all those search terms. For example, most searches are geology/mineralogy related, from sand shape to composition of certain sandstones in eastern Germany. ‘Sand color’ is also a very sought after term, as well as ‘foraminifera’ or the names of different places that I wrote about in my posts. There are also neat questions such as ‘is it ok to collect sand in kauai’ or ‘why does sand come in so many different colors’?

Despite some custom software available, Microsoft Office provides a very convenient solution for the management of sand collections: the classical MS Excel. Working with tables in Excel is really practical especially if you make full use of its very powerful functions. There are plenty of them available but the one I’d like to talk about is COUNTIF.

By definition, COUNTIF function “counts the number of cells within a range that meet the given criteria”. It looks something like COUNTIF(range,criteria), where range is the column or row of interest and criteria can be a number or another cell. How can this be useful? Well, how about the question: “how many sands do I have from country X?” or “what countries am I still missing in my collection?”. Using COUNTIF is very easy to find the answer automatically: just assign the function range to the column where you have the countries’ names (e.g. A1:A300) and for criteria just type the name of the country you are interested in. For even better results, create a separate column where you list ALL the countries in the world (let’s say column C) and put in the column D (in cell D1) the following formula: COUNTIF(A1:A500,C1).You will have thus an automated list of countries and the number of sands from each individual country (you need to be careful that all countries are spelled correctly, otherwise they won’t appear in statistics).

In what it concerns me I went further with using the COUNTIF function and recorded also the first administrative units from each country. This may be useful for those collectors who aim, for example, at collecting at least one sand from each administrative unit in the world. The problems may arise from the way how some regions and provinces are spelled out (especially in languages using diacritics). My solution for this is to use unique two-letter codes for both country and region (here I would highly recommend the www.statoids.com website).

The results look like in the image above, with countries and their subdivisions organized alphabetically on columns. I put all the info on a separate tab within the same worksheet for very quick access to the data and I created separate tab only for countries in case that I need an even faster response. All basic data are on tab ‘Sand Atlas’ and, if you select a very wide range (in my case A1:A100000), any new entry will be automatically added to the statistics so you don’t need to worry about anything. This method allows me to know just with a quick glance that among Spanish provinces, for example, 30 sands are from Canary Islands (ES-CN code) or 12 from Andalusia (ES-CN), but none from Aragon, Navarra, Ceuta etc.

PS: For fellow collectors using MS Excel in German language, the function corresponding to COUNTIF( ) is ZÄHLENWENN( ).

Last weekend the Sand Atlas has been featured in the Through the sandglass website, the great informative blog of Michael Welland. I consider Michael a living encyclopedia in everything related to sand, his great book Sand – A never-ending story being an amazing journey “from individual grains to desert dunes, from the bottom of the sea to the landscapes of Mars, and from billions of years in the past to the future”.

The logo of Michael’s website

Michael has also used several images of my Bali sands: Cucukan beach (volcanic sand), Klotok beach (high magnetite content), Sanur beach (biogenic sand made of foraminifera) and Legian beach. Thank you for your kind words about my website, Michael!

For sand collectors, Hawaii is perhaps one of the most exciting state in the US. Green olivine sand is already famous for its beauty but also for the stories with annoyed spirits who protect the islands from bad mannered tourists. The second largest Hawaiian islands is Maui, a lovely piece of heaven of volcanic origin. The volcanism in the area has been so strong and dense over the millennia that lava coming from two neighbour volcanoes (one on the western side and one on the east) overlapped each other and formed a so-called volcanic doublet. The merged lava gave birth to an iron-reach rock and, due to repeated tidal and aeolian erosion, this rock further turned into a beautiful reddish sand.

The sample no 2204 US-HI from my Sand Atlas collection comes from Hana Bay on the far eastern side of the Maui island. Lava eroded from the volcano’s top was sprayed into the air. When meeting the strong winds coming from the ocean, the lava accumulated on the shores formed a small mountainous summit called also Ka’uiki Hill. The sand in the image above comes from there and, multiplied several times (width of the image is about 8 mm), it shows the amazing complexity of each and every sand grain.

The Altenberger lake is an artificial lake with a surface of about 4 ha located 10 km south of Eisenach in the German state of Thuringia. Since 1950, the lake is surrounded by a camping site and is nowadays visited by numerous campers and tourists.

The lake shores are vegetated and only a very small area contains sand. This has the look of a small beach (although it could also be an artificial beach created by the site owners). As we spent the last weekend there I just took a small sample for the Sand Atlas. The sand is now drying and has a common sandstone-look (not quite characteristic for the area though).

We had to visit a friend in Berlin a few days ago and, since the weather was great, we decided to drive back home using mostly national roads and avoid the busy highway. We were happy to do that since we could see some really nice places in the outskirts of Berlin. Among them, we had several stops at some of the many lakes and water bodies surrounding Berlin – it’s really nice to see how such a big metropolitan city can integrate into that beautiful landscape.

To my surprise, on the way from Berlin to the next town called Königs Wusterhausen I just spotted on the left side a… sand dune. We stopped the car immediately and had a short walk on the great sand which felt like in the middle of a desert. A pine forest grows on the dune but the marginal areas were exposed revealing a beautiful beige, fine sand.

Looking through some old folders I just found our photos from Portugal from last year. We had a two weeks car trip along the whole western coast jumping from one camping place to another and making some stops for – what else – gathering sand samples. The photo below is from Praia de Salgueiros, Vila Nova de Gaia, near Porto. More about our trip to Portugal soon, I am working on a dedicated article for the whole trip.

Vila Nova de Gaia, Praia de Salgueiros (Atlantic Ocean)

Today I have just finished filling over 300 samples in vials! The batch is waiting on my desk since October last year, I just couldn’t find the time until now to take care of them. I am quite happy about the result especially because all the samples have now received full description in my sand atlas (still need to check some other 200-300 old entries though).