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)

Today I’ve got the idea of having a closer look into my collection and after some playing around with numbers I decided to share them with you. Here are the results as per February 8, 2011:

Top 10 countries

This is the chart with top 10 countries represented in my collection. As expected, Germany is on first place with 287 sands, while an important part of the samples are self collected (43%) and the rest gathered from trades (57%). Israel is occupies the second place with 136 sands (almost all self collected within six months in 2007), followed by the U.S.A. with 133 sands (I have visited U.S. once but got only 2 samples since the time did not allow much sand collecting).

Collection growth rate

My sand collection is rather new, with the first sample added on May 14, 2007. Over these last four years 53 people kindly contributed with sand, both gifts from friends as well as “serious” exchange with other fellow collectors. A big advantage has been given by the small amount collected (about 6 ml) which allowed me to increase quite fast the number of samples. The most “successful” year was thus 2007 with 699 sands, followed by a less profitable 2008 with only 333 sands, 527 sands in 2009, 573 in 2010 and already 51 sands in the first month of 2011.

I will try to add more common statistics in the future (for instance with the origins of my sands: beach, desert, river etc). A bit latter will follow a series of more scientific analysis of my collection as I am very interested in several other aspects: what is the relationship between the sand type (biogenic, mineral) and the place of origin, or the distribution of sands along meridian lines. I also have some other ideas so keep visiting the website more often.

I recently received with joy a sand sample from Indonesia. I have actually expected some black sand, eventually magnetite, but for my surprise, nice round foraminifera specimens have shown up from between the other more or less common mineral grains.

2106 ID-BA Indonesia – Bali – Bali island, Beach at Pemuteran

How often did you walk on a beach looking for the right spot to collect your sand and the strong wind made your ears vibrating? And how often did you climb with your hair randomly flying around you on those mountain paths to reach the top and, of course, get the best lava sample from either Fuji, Etna or you-name-it volcano? Hey nation, now you can get protection Go get your own designed beanie using the “Mützenkonfigurator” at www.quchu.de.

The website is in German language only but once landed at quchu.de you’ll get it right from the first second: just hit Konfigurator and put “your ideas on your head“, as Ralf and Virgi, the guys behind Quchu would say. Made you curious already? Go get your beanie then or just wait a little for the English version. It’s fun and makes good for a gift in case you like your head in direct contact with the sky. And if you live in Florida, you can still order one beanie and take it with you to sand collecting on the beach: you can always use it to carry the sand you collected back to your car in case you run out of plastic baggies. The volume? It’s all about your head size!

Happy sand collecting

Deep underneath the Earth surface the rocks are exposed to high temperatures and extremely high pressure given by the mass of rock that lay on top of them. These factors may affect their chemical and physical composition and transform them into rocks with new properties and aspect. These are the metamorphic rocks.

In real world, some sands may still let us see the original rock they are made of in forms of small rock fragments. These are noticeable with naked eye or under microscope (in photo above I have been using my general photo-setup). I find it fascinating how a little stone of just 2-3 mm (photo width: ca. 0.8 cm) can look so mysterious when seen from close distance.

Very often sand collectors have difficulties in describing the sand colors. While descriptions like “greenish beige” or “reddish yellow” can give a vague image on the original color, they can also misslead due to the subjectivity of the author, lingvistic skills, lightning conditions and many others. What was always missing is a standardized classification of sand colors using either custom made color tabs or some already existing international systems.

Color gradient chart made of real scans of sand samples

Several attempts have been made to describing sand colors by using hexadecimal color codes, similar to those used in internet for websites design (e.g. #FFFFFF for white, #FF0000 for red etc). The method is not really suitable for sand because sand does usually contains patches of more colors according to its mineralogical composition. However, selecting “most representative” colors (instead of just one) and listing their hexadecimal codes could be one step forward in finding best way to describe the colors of your sand collection.

There are several internet websites who can provide free photo analysis. Among them I like most www.colorsuckr.com which is providing detailed list of 12 most common colors found in one particular image. You can enter the full URL of the image and the website is returning something like this:

Left image: 0312 KE-RV Kenya, Rift Valley, Samburu National Reserve
Right image: 0264 PH-MM Philippines, Metropolitan Manila, Luzon island, Manila

I personally find that 12 colors is too much to describe a sand sample. 3 or 4 would be than enough, eventually including a percentage of how much of the respective color can be found in the image. Nevertheless, the website is very handy to use when it comes to quick extracting most common colors and for the Firefox users there is available a simple add-on to make getting image colors even easier than ever. Just install the ColorSuckr Add-on for your Firefox browser, then simply right click any image on a webpage and choose ‘Extract Image Colors’ from the menu to go stright to the ColorSuckr website with the analysed image.

For web developpers, here’s a link to a PHP class that reverses the most used color tones from one image (it can open an image in the following formats: JPEG, GIF or PNG): Color extract PHP class.

Just a few km north of Danube river in most southern region of Romania (Dolj county) there is a small town with 20.000 inhabitants called Dabuleni. The name may tell you nothing but in Romania is rather famous for the production of… water melons. The reason for high land productivity is actually the… sand, large surfaces being covered by fine, white sands, making the area very suitable for irrigated agriculture.

Sandy soils north of Dabuleni, Romania (photo: Google)

Among the 80.000 ha of sandy soils in the south of Romania, Dabuleni occupies about 3.500 ha. Over the years there’s been a couple of initiatives for taking benefit of this huge area and the authorities developed a complex irrigation system which is working also today. Some parcels have been planted with specific trees and crops but the soil seems to be very favorable especially for water melons. A 12 ha area has been kept virgin and the authorities proudly call it the “only sand musem in Europe” (?!) For trivia fans, the zone is locally know also as “Oltenian Sahara”.

Some while ago I started to put together a image library of sand scans. Basically I collected images from all my sands by using a transparent foil with a rectangle of 5 x 5 m on it and scanned the sands on a regulat flat bed scanner. The results were displayed on the first version of the Sand Atlas. Unfortunally I had to stop after collecting about 700 scans since the operation took me a lot of my free time. Lately I had to satisfy my artistic needs with some photographs of the sands stored in little vials:

Nowadays I’m using Picasa for organising some old photography folders and got by coincidence to open the sand scans library. I found this overview (random samples, size is 5 x 5 cm) and though that I may share it with you. It actually shows one core idea that most sand collectors are aware of: world diversity in its most beauty, apart from the feeling of being able to hold the whole world in only one hand.

Well, enjoy your hobby… I surely do it too…