Fascinating Facts About Sand

You might think of all sand as boring beige. But sand comes in every colour

- Emily Goodman

1 The black sand in Hawaii and Santorini has volcanic minerals mixed into it. Bermuda’s pink beaches get their colour from the red and pink shells of tiny marine creatures. Even rarer is green sand; its colour comes from the mineral olivine. Only a few beaches have enough of it to appear green, one of which is in Norway. And on Rainbow Beach in Australia, the sand appears in more than 70 colours.

2 SOME OF the things we consume are considered to be sand. We think of sand as the stuff that beaches are made of, but technically it’s any material made up of grains measuring six one-hundredths of a millimetre to two millimetres in diameter. According to that definition, salt and sugar qualify.

3 THE STUFF on the shores can come from a variety of sources, including from the poop of parrotfish, which eat algae and dead coral and excrete hundreds of tonnes of sand a year. Sound gross? Perhaps, but the sand that comes out of parrotfish is what you’ll find on some of Hawaii’s most beautiful white beaches.

4 STILL, MOST sand comes from granulated rocks that streams carry to the sea—some 2 billion metric tonnes of it each year. Yet we use 45 billion metric tonnes of sand around the world annually, to make sandpaper, paint and the silicon chips that power computers. It’s also in construction materials such as concrete, brick and glass.