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).

The most controversial North American state for sand collectors, Hawaii, does always surprise with abnormal compositions of its beaches. Beside the spectacular olivine sands, one specific island contains one of the weirdest sand on the planet:

On Kauai island there is a beach full of glass debris eroded so much by the continuous action of waves that it blends extremely well with the existing quartz sands. The sea glass from the Glass Beach comes in many colors, very often white, brown and gray but also green, blue or yellow. The pebble-sized glass particles come from used bottles, broken windows and all kind of trash dumped on that particular piece of beach located near a former industrial area.

Just some days ago the whether allowed us a short day trip to the surroundings. It was still cold but somehow acceptable so we took the car and drove NE to Lausitzer Seenland, a chain of artificial lakes somewhere between Dresden and Berlin. Before country reunification the area was very popular for its lignite opencast mines but due to environmental reasons the mining industry had to cease its activity.

Nowadays several artificial lakes are going to be created on the site of former mines (some of them are finished already) generating new landscape very suitable for touristic activities. And of course, also for sand collecting…

The dream of every sand collector… star sand from Okinawa archipelago along the Japanese coastline. Thanks to Matt Whaley I also have a sample now from Taketomi island, absolutely beautiful. Nice… nice… nice…

The so-called ‘star sand’ is a biogenic sand made of skeletons of tiny, mono-celled sea creatures belonging to the foraminifera group (their scientific name is Baclogypsina sphaerulata). The star sand represents a touristic attraction not only among sand collectors but also ‘regular’ tourists search for it on the only two Japanese islands of Okinawa prefecture that contain it: Taketomi and Iriomote islands.

People searching for star sand on the Japanese island Iriomote (source: Wikipedia)