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The Daily Bucket - sand library [1]
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Date: 2022-10-29
New Jersey barrier island beach
I’m an arenophile. That word comes from the “Latin arena (sand) and the Greek phil (love)”, meaning sand lover.
As Rachel Carson wrote, "In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand, there is a story of the Earth.”
By oceans, lakes, rivers, deserts, mountainsides, glaciers — anywhere the bones of our planet have been worked on by forces of nature — unique and shifting formations of sand accumulate. Each tells a story.
Welcome to the sand library in my house:
Part of it. There’s an annex in the hall.
Coral reef sand littered with shells and coral fragments. Belize.
Technically sand is defined as mineral sediment particles of an intermediate size (numbers depend on who’s defining it), with smaller grains called silt and larger ones gravel, but “sand” is generally used as an umbrella term for any accumulation of granular material eroded from rock, including rock formed from the shells of sea creatures, like limestone, or even recently dead, like coral. Much of the sand on Caribbean beaches is from coral consumed by parrotfish: their digestive tract grinds it up, extracts the living material and then poops out the calcium carbonate portion as sand.
Hoh River, Olympic peninsula
Rock anywhere can be weathered by water or wind, physically or chemically. Particles are then carried by natural forces through space and time, so sand can be found in many settings not just ocean shores. Sand accumulates by rivers and lakes, in deserts, on mountainsides and other locales inland. Some soil is even basically sand if it contains little organic decomposed material.
Sand weathers and accumulates underwater too
What makes sand so fascinating to me — besides being so beautiful — is how various it is in color, texture, composition, and how all those qualities relate to its origin. Why are some sands uniform while others are a mix of sediment sizes? Why are some sands grey and others yellow or red or white? Where did the sand grains come from? How long ago? Why are some particles rounded while others have sharp edges? Why is sand different from another spot even a few feet away? Beneath our feet are many mysteries.
Pink garnet grains on a Washington beach, washed down from the mountains and deposited this way because they have a different density than the grey local bedrock sediment
Each sand tells a story. Unlike the stories of our ephemeral human lives, the stories of sand are usually much much older. For example, the sand along the Colorado River, which cuts through a high desert today, is from various layers of sedimentary rock — shales, limestones, sandstones — laid down in layers over hundreds of millions of years, sometimes a under shallow seas or marshes, unrecognizably different settings from what we see today.
While the stories in books are written with words, the stories of sand can be discovered from their features and the settings where they have been deposited by nature. To reveal those stories it’s necessary to have the actual sand sample in hand since a photo misses many of their qualities. Hence my sand library. In recent years I’ve been trying to get photos of the sites where sand was collected to help reveal their stories.
Indonesia. Thailand. PN Guinea. Fiji. Australia. Spain.
💙
I’ve been collecting samples for decades. I actually took this project over from my mother back in the 1980s. She was an adventurer and collector, keenly interested in what can be learned on journeys. Between the two of us over the past half century we have collected from many sites around the state, country and world, and persuaded friends, family, neighbors, friends of friends and so on, to contribute as well. Over my 35-year teaching career I encouraged students to add to the library when they traveled, and I used the sand samples in my science classes. Kids analyzed them for silica vs carbonate, physical and chemical weathering, mineral composition, shoreline dynamics, etc.
A year ago my mother died, aged 96. Many of the sand samples we’d collected personally and from others were still in miscellaneous bags piled into buckets and boxes, so I spent a few months transferring them into jars, labeling and organizing on shelves. Samples without labels had to be thrown out — geographic setting is an essential clue in a sand’s story. I kept as many of my mother’s original labels as possible, and taped them onto the jars. I consider the sand library a memorial to her, an inspiration to keep exploring and learning: the L.P.D. Memorial Sand Library.
My mom and dad near Deerness, Orkney Islands
Greece, Italy, Morocco, Egypt, India. Scotland
My dad and friends on a dune in the Sahara Desert
South America. East Coast US. Australia. Japan
My mom, a sister and cousins on a creek tributary of the Fraser River, near the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia
Hawaii. Central America. Russia. New England
The library is a dynamic project, a work in progress since it’s missing stories from many parts of the country and the world. It would even be valuable to collect from sites I already have because rock continues to erode and sand is constantly moving. I’m on the lookout for samples, even getting my grandchildren to participate now.
Granddaughter at La Push, Washington
If any of you Bucketeers would like to contribute to the library, kosmail me.
🫧
THE DAILY BUCKET IS A NATURE REFUGE. WE AMICABLY DISCUSS ANIMALS, WEATHER, CLIMATE, SOIL, PLANTS, WATERS AND NOTE LIFE’S PATTERNS. WE INVITE YOU TO NOTE WHAT YOU ARE SEEING AROUND YOU IN YOUR OWN PART OF THE WORLD, AND TO SHARE YOUR OBSERVATIONS IN THE COMMENTS BELOW. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PURPOSE AND HISTORY OF THE DAILY BUCKET FEATURE, CHECK OUT THIS DIARY: DAILY BUCKET PHENOLOGY: 11 YEARS OF RECORDING EARTH'S VITAL SIGNS IN OUR NEIGHBORHOODS
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