Explore the Hidden World of Sand (magnifiedsand.com)

John McPhee had a great New Yorker article (which I think was also in the collection Irons in the Fire), where he wrote about how U.S. geologists used sand found in the Japanese "Fu-Go" bombs that made it to the NW US to figure out their launch sites from specific beaches near Tokyo.

It starts on the 9th page here

https://gwern.net/doc/technology/1996-mcphee.pdf

This is quality content! A peek into the real wonders of the world and not the usual opinionated slop we are getting way too used to.

Love this!

I've heard that desert sand is fundamentally smoother than beach or river sand. Would love to see some examples of non-beach sand side-by-side with these glorious samples.

Very neat, never thought about how different beaches are. Like the sites theme, easy to read as well.

I think the rotating photos create a poor UX. The purpose of this layout it seems is to let users view the images carefully and study the details, but the slideshow effect makes that difficult.

I remember reading about a case where a murderer was tied to the crime scene just by analysing the quality of soil on his shoes.

It seemed far fetched then, but after seeing these pictures it really makes sense.

This is lovely. I'd hoped to see The Coral Beach on the Isle of Skye[1] featured. In retrospect the bits are maybe a bit large[2] to be called "sand".

I'm sure it's very much frowned upon these days but somewhere I have a 35mm film canister full of the coral fragments.

[1] https://www.isleofskye.com/skye-guide/top-ten-skye-walks/cor... [2] https://www.isleofskye.com/skye-guide/top-ten-skye-walks/cor...

No sand from Brazil with such a huge coastline?

This is fantastic! Excellent share. Though I object vigorously to its exclusion of any beach in California. Scandalous!

I come from a island where its common to pain with sand. About one hundred beach, around two hundred colors, green is hard to make.

I learned that local sand composition is very affected by local geology.

I’ve had a sand collection for many years. I keep small vials on my shelf. From the Namib desert, to the slope of Mt Fuji, to Alaskan tundra. It’s a fun way to catalog places I’ve been.

This is just amazing to look at. Incredible, that there are shells as little as grains of sand.

These pictures would make great wallpapers.

FYI, in many countries and U.S. states, it's illegal to take sand from a beach.

Cool website though.

(Also, in many U.S. parks, it's illegal to take rocks, sticks, or other natural material.)

It would be nice if they included zoomed out pictures as well, is hard to tell what the beaches look like in person from the magnified sand.

Since sand is a non-renewable resource that is needed for construction, there’s a lot of illegal activity going on.

In India, illegal sand mining is the country's largest organized criminal activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_theft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_sand_trade

> and roughly 700,000,000,000 cubic meters of beach on Earth.

I wonder how they determine the average depth of beach sand?

I love this site - it has been listed before, quite a while back, I seem to remember.

Seeing it again, with how powerful phones are and what good macro cameras they often have now, identifying sand seems like it would be a fun ML + mobile app project.

I wish there existed a cheap sorting machine that could sort or arrange these grains by color

It gets even better putting the sand from the shoreline with water under a microscope. Lots of little things moving around.

I always wondered how many of the translucent stones were actually worn down shards of beer bottles.

I love this page. What the internet was made for. I sometimes wish they had closed down development after creating this page and the page with detailed information about Star Trek TNG episodes.