Everyone loves getting their toes in the sand along Alabama&#;s beautiful beaches, but do you know how that sand is created?
AnYiCheng Product Page
Our sand is softer and finer than you see on most other beaches around the world. That&#;s the result of pure, white quartz crystal that washed down from the Appalachian Mountains and was deposited in the Gulf of Mexico.
According to Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University (aka Dr. Beach), rivers delivered the sand from those mountains, bringing a lot of different minerals with them. &#;But rivers stopped bringing any new sand for tens of thousands of years. During this long period of time, wave action has ground the particles down to size. Quartz, being the most resistant mineral commonly available on the face of the earth, is the only type of sand grain left, as the other minerals were ground down to dust. Not being stable on the high-energy beach, these fine-grained sediments were transported and deposited offshore. What we find on Central Gulf beaches today is quartz sand crystal at its terminal size, meaning that all the grains are nearly the same size.&#;
Quartz particles give our sand a different look and feel than sand composed of heavier minerals such as titanium. Because it&#;s made of ultra-fine mineral, under a microscope you can actually see the individual quartz crystals that make up the sand.
Want more information on Quartz Sand Proppant? Feel free to contact us.
Erosion naturally shifts sand, and storm surges move it back out into the gulf; therefore, beach re-nourishment projects are undertaken periodically to replace the sand. The sand is pumped from a site in the gulf chosen for its match of the color, size and shape of the sand onshore. Once the sand is pumped onto the shoreline, it&#;s spread along stretches of beach. Then sea oats and other natural vegetation, sand fencing and dunes are constructed to help protect the newly formed beach.
Next time you put your toes in that soft, white sand, take a moment to marvel at the wonder of our beaches.
Sand, whether you use it for building sand castles, telling time with an hourglass, or hydraulic fracturing, is pretty much the same just about anywhere you go, an uncountable number of tiny grains mixed together to form the same dunes and beaches.
But why does sand almost always look the same? And how does so much of it end up at the beach?
Well, much of the world's sand is made out of the same stuff, tiny crystals of the mineral quartz, which is made out of silica and oxygen, the two most common elements in Earth's crust.
And as you'll know if you've ever been through the crust of a sandwich that had sand in it, quartz grains are small and really tough. Here's why.
Quartz crystals form within a cooling glob of molten granite rock, or magma, deep under the Earth's surface. As the magma cools, different minerals crystallize into solid rock at different temperatures and quartz is one of the last minerals to form. It's forced to crystallize in the tiny spaces left in the now cooling rock, pretty much ensuring that it ends up in a specific size range.
But being last has lasting advantages. Minerals that do form in the earlier, hotter conditions have weaker chemical structures and weather away more easily than quartz. Kind of like how a relationship forged in the heat of passion might not be as stable as a deep bond developed over time.
So as the weak flash in the pan minerals wear away, the unfaltering quartz grains are left to pop out of the rock as sand.
And then it's only a matter of time, sometimes a very long time, before the quartz sand gets whisked away by streams and rivers and carried to the sea.
There, at the mouth of a river, the fast flowing water slows abruptly and the well-rounded sand drops out. Larger rocks and pebbles were already left behind upstream, while smaller sediments, like silt and clay, continue to be swept along by the weakened current and are deposited further from the shore.
Over thousands and thousands of years, the paths of rivers sweep up and down the coast, dropping off piles of sand to be spread by waves and currents into smooth, sandy beaches.
Of course, not all beaches are purely quartz sand and not all quartz sand ends up on beaches. But the fact that so many beaches and so many sands are the same is a testament to the chemistry of the most common components of the Earth's crust as they cool and crystallize and to the physics of sediment, slowly shifting and surging towards the sea. They are, quite literally, the sands of time.
For more information, please visit OEM high strength proppant wholesaler.