News: Zooming Into Sand

Incredible. There's a type of sand (found only on the small Okinawan island of Iriomote) in which each grain resembles a tiny star. And I never would have known, if it hadn't been for blogger Jason Kottke's pal Mouser. Mouser collects sand from all around the world, and then documents each sample with a macro lens:

Zooming Into Sand — A vial of Pāpōhaku Beach sand to show scale. Click on the second icon below to see the same sand magnified.

Zooming Into Sand — A vial of Pāpōhaku Beach sand to show scale. Click on the second icon below to see the same sand magnified.

Zooming Into Sand — Pure orange sand from Coral Sand Dunes, Utah.

Zooming Into Sand — Sand from Papakōlea Beach. Mouser says: "The green grains are olivine, the black are basalt, and the white are possibly bits of shell. Green sand is reasonably rare; the southern tip of the big island of Hawai'i is the most common place to get it."

Zooming Into Sand — Star sand, found only on a few beaches in southern Japan, made of "the calcified shells of tiny organisms only a few milimeters across."

Zooming Into Sand — A grain of star greatly magnified under the microscope.

Zooming Into Sand — White, soft sand from Kichanga Lodge Beach, Zanzibar.

Zooming Into Sand — Sand from a glacial runoff on Kilimanjaro.

Previously, Bark: An Intimate Look at the World's Trees.

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2 Comments

That's so cool - I didn't know that there were different types of sand like that!

I've bigger ones that dont require microscope to see the star shapes, I got them from Penghu of Taiwan and they are organisms that makes up of corals O:

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