Source: Wired, 2014
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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Having looked at sand under a microscope for many, many hours: kinda? These images are not just heavily curated but arranged. Yes I've had a bunch with random shell fragments and forams SOMETIMES but notice in those images the pieces are carefully spread out?
Most clean sand looks like the bottom right two images but even those are already filtered for interest. I have a bunch of stuff that looks like the bottom middle photo, which is a contentinal glacial sand deposit that is sorted by wave action to have more heavy minerals (pink garnet, black probably magnetite, a splash of green epidote and white qtz splashed in there). It's usually a thin THIN layer found on some beaches. It's like a "pretty" sand people know about and not indicative of the vast majority of sand.
Most sand even in a variety of environments is quartz and random lithic (rock) fragments.
I get a little annoyed when these images (usually the top 3) are shared and layman say, "look at how beautiful ALL sand looks! Appreciate the micro world blah blah some inspirational quote." It's straight up misinformation but because it's "just sand" most people don't care.
I care. Regular sand IS pretty and it's neat to look at for a little bit. Stop making sand feel bad with unrealistic beauty standards :p.
Would the pink sand from eroding Canadian Shield type rocks be worth looking at? I think there are garnet and quartz around
I always think sand is worth looking at at least once, lol. Get a hand lens (like $10?) and check it out!
Also it's probably pink not because of garnet but because of the oxidized bedrock. I've seen a ton of stuff that looked like that on the shores around the Lake Superior and it was usually some form of basalt, rhyolite, or rare sedimentary interbed. You'd probably see a bunch of smaller reddish pinkish sand grains along with darker gray ones and maybe some milky quartz. But IIRC Canadian Shield stuff is pretty diverse and I recall there being some gnarly meta stuff out there so you might find some glittery mica and garnets.
Do you know what the sand from elafonissi beach (Crete) looks like under a microscope? It really does look pinky when you’re there, and I was told it was because of a certain type of seashell that made up the majority of the top sand. I was a kid though, definitely could have been lies.
Never heard of it but sounds nice! Pink sands can happen for a variety of reasons and I'm not sure exactly what is going on in Crete. I collected some pink sand in the Bahamas that I found interesting and long story short, it was manganese stained fossil coral. It sounds like a similar process is happening in Crete with red stained foraminifera tests (tiny shells). Not sure what the red is in the tests in Crete without digging into it as I only did a cursory search but iron oxide and/or manganese aren't horrible guesses.
Looks like a cool spot!