The sand is a time capsule which tells a story.

The sand is a time capsule which tells a story.

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Sand can be anything that's been worn down until it's reduced to some tiny essential fragment of what it once was.

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It's a technical term.Bigger than sand? That's gravel.

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Smaller? Silt.

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Go to beaches across the world and you find sand that looks completely different. If you could take a single grain of sand from every beach you would have a history of the world pinched between two fingers.

A hundred years ago, a pebble chipped off a slab of granite in the Sierra mountains.

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It was dragged by the current of the Sacramento River through the Delta, out the Golden Gate and onto the beaches of San Francisco.
Sacramento River

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Delta

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Baches of San Francisco.

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Sometimes, sand is a graveyard, full of dead bodies.This is the shell of a tiny foram, a single celled organism whose skeletons litter the bottom of the ocean.

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This sand? Almost entirely coral.

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This one, shards of lava from a Hawaiian volcano.

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This tiny quartz tumbled down the waterways of Appalachia,all the way to the beaches of Florida.

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Waterways of Appalachia,

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By the time it got there, it had worn down to the consistency of sugar.

Time takes a big thing, and makes it small. But sometimes the opposite can happen.Behold, ooid.

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The only sand that accretes rather than erodes. Think snowball effect. A tiny speck of brine shrimp poop is tossed and turned on the ocean floor accumulating minerals like calcium, until it's a grain of sand the size of a pin tip.Sand is a snapshot in time, a stopping point between the very big and the very small, the landlocked, and the oceanic.