9 Servant: Sand in Our Lives

Servant

Sand in Our Lives

A foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.

Matthew 7:26

BUILT ON SAND

The fate of Ozymandias, the much-debated significance of Lucky’s sand-filled suitcase in Waiting for Godot, pockets full of sand, lessons made of sand—gloom, despair, and pointlessness are the messages. Sand has come to be used as a symbol of the fragile side of the human condition: foolishness, futility, worthlessness, heartache. But as we have seen in the previous chapter, sand can also be a source of inspiration and creativity. It has a complex role. In reality, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone” (In Praise of Darkness, 1974). And so we do. If a wicked fairy were to wave her magic wand and remove everything around us that owes its origin to sand, things would look disturbingly different. If the wand waving occurred at night, the effects would be less easily seen because the lights would have gone out.

We are a society built on sand. Given that sand is one of the most ubiquitous materials on the planet, this should not be surprising; but the sheer diversity of the ways in which sand plays a role in our lives (beyond the purely recreational) may be unexpected, as sand often acts behind the scenes. The diversity of sand’s roles makes this a difficult chapter to construct—to spin a coherent story from such a huge cast of disparate characters would be strained, even if it were possible. I shall therefore fall back on that old, trusted structure for compendia—the A to Z. Over the following pages is a miscellany, a selection of topics that highlights the leading roles of sand and alludes to others: the obvious and the invisible, the macroscopic and the microscopic, the serious and the whimsical.

Sand plays a leading, if often primitively simple, role in the class of industrial commodities referred to as aggregates. These are all the rock particles and lumps—whether sand, gravel, crushed rock, or recycled materials—that are used to build and weight down things. Roads and concrete are the primary beneficiaries (see concrete). Traditionally, the United States has been the largest producer of aggregates in the world, churning out well over a billion tons of sand and gravel for the construction industry every year. However, given the fevered rate of construction in China, including its record consumption of concrete, it is quite likely that the global hotbed of aggregate production has shifted: production levels in any country are intimately linked with its economic health and the exuberance of its construction industry. Industrial sand production relies largely on the work of rivers and ice sheets eroding, transporting, sorting, and dumping deposits of an attractive commercial quantity and quality of sand. Extraction is done almost entirely by surface mining, whether on land or the seabed: marine deposits are an increasingly important source, removed by dredging or suction (see islands and Korea).

As anyone who has experienced a sandstorm or observed objects subjected to blowing sand can testify, the material is highly abrasive. Sandpaper represents the familiar exploitation of this property around the home. Sandpaper has been used at least since sand and crushed shells were glued to parchment in China seven hundred years ago; mass production began with glass paper in England, and sandpaper was patented in the United States in 1834. Today, much of the abrasive material used in sandpaper is not quartz but aluminum oxide and silicon carbide, but it’s all sand, by definition, because of its size (and, anyway, silicon carbide is manufactured from quartz sand). Sandpaper grit sizes correspond closely to Wentworth and Udden’s scales for natural sands down to the “microgrit” category, in which the abrasive material is finer than very fine sand.

The ancient Egyptians used sand in combination with bronze saws to cut stone for their monuments—sand grains have been found embedded in abandoned cuts. The method was described by Pliny, and it was employed for centuries. Samuel Pepys, in an entry from his famous seventeenth-century diary, related this example of its use:

I staid a great while talking with a man in the garden that was sawing a piece of marble, and did give him 6d to drink. He told me much of the nature and labour of the worke, how he could not saw above 4 inches of the stone in a day . . . and after it is sawed, then it is rubbed with coarse and then with finer and finer sand tille they come to putty, and so polish it as smooth as glass. Their saws have no teeth, but it is the sand only which the saw rubs up and down that do the thing.

Today’s grit-impregnated saw blades are simply the latest examples of the technology.

Sandblasting replicates a natural sandstorm, but in a controlled way, using the same materials as sandpaper. I spent a good part of my youth in Manchester, England, where the architectural pride of the city is the gigantically gothic Victorian town hall. As a landmark of the Industrial Revolution, it was always thought by the citizens to be naturally black—until it was cleaned, sandblasted to reveal the glowing 300-million-year-old sandstone with which it was faced. Countless buildings around the world have been refreshed, if somewhat brutally, by sandblasting. Frank Gehry’s dramatic Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was recently ignominiously subjected to the treatment to dull its undulating stainless-steel structure, which was too blindingly reflective.

Sandblasting has replaced hand carving as a way to inscribe gravestones and is a standard method of precision glass etching. It can also be a controlled method of sculpting stone in preparation for the final, detailed work of masons. The 1920s Barclay-Vesey Building in New York, the first art deco skyscraper in the city and a classic piece of architecture, was severely damaged on September 11, 2001, and the replacement panels for its sculpted exterior are works of art by expert sandblasters and masons.

There are also some bizarre applications of sandblasting. If you want your skin to have that glowing, refreshed look, you can try “microdermabrasion,” where a jet of very fine sand is used to remove dead skin cells and unblock pores. But, tragically, the production of sandblasted jeans causes workers in unregulated factories around the world to suffer from the malign and deadly side of sand—silicosis. This debilitating and incurable lung disease, first recognized in stonecutters in the eighteenth century (but also seen in ancient Egyptians through autopsies of mummies), is caused by the inhalation of fine silica sand and dust.

Before the invention of blotting paper (first mentioned in English in a fifteenth-century text), blotting sand was used to absorb ink on manuscripts; even today, every desk in the United States Senate is equipped with an inkwell and a sand shaker for blotting. Grains of sand not blown off by the writer occasionally fall out of old manuscripts. (Incidentally, quill pens were “cured” by immersing them in hot sand.) The blotting ability of sand, its capacity to soak up liquids, is a reflection of the physics of surface tension on the grains. It was put to great use in the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome to soak up blood and other fluids. This characteristic of sand is used today to handle emergency spillages in laboratories and factories. Coats of blotting sand are now required on new road asphalt (which itself contains sand).

Cows whose bedding is sand have far lower levels of bacteria than those bedded in sawdust; the sand is almost equally effective as an absorbent but more sterile than sawdust. There are machines specifically designed to process the sand and remove the manure.

Sand not only absorbs liquids but also absorbs energy. Sand-filled barrels were developed for use around motor-racing circuits after a particularly bad accident at Le Mans in 1955. The energy-absorbing character of sand provides one of the more frustrating elements to the game of golf, the numerous different ways in which a golf ball can bury itself in the granular material of a sand trap stimulating a range of golfing terminology—and expletives. Sand is what long jumpers jump into. And, on a more subtle level, aficionados of the production of fine sound use the damping qualities of sand to stabilize speakers and other audio equipment.

When the wicked fairy waves her magic wand, a large part of the fabric of modern cities and towns will simply disappear—your vanished diamonds will be the least of your concerns. The construction business is entirely dependent on sand, and our modern cities are monuments to it. The use of sandstone as a building material is obvious. In Washington DC, the White House is white because it was painted to cover the poor-quality sandstone that the Scottish masons had to work with (the Scots being used to Edinburgh, a city built of much older, more solid rock). The original Smithsonian Institution building is made of sterner stuff—Triassic red sandstone. The Pentagon, however, is made of concrete, for which nearly 700,000 tons of sand were dredged from the Potomac River.

The recipe for basic concrete is simple and has been around for a long time. The ancient Egyptians knew how to make it (there is a lively debate as to whether the pyramids, at least in part, are made of concrete), and the Romans perfected the formula. The fundamental ingredients are around 75 percent sand and gravel, 15 percent water, and 10 percent cement. The cement, cooked from materials such as limestone and clay, is the chemical glue; the hardening of concrete is not simply due to drying but involves complex chemical reactions. The physical characteristics of the sand, its size and shape, influence the properties of the concrete, but because of the importance of chemistry, the composition of the sand and the other ingredients is critical. The wrong impurities will ruin the quality of the concrete (which is why the trade in salt-encrusted sand by villagers in The Woman in the Dunes is illegal).

The global demand for concrete is massive: after water, concrete is the most consumed material on Earth. Every year, the equivalent of more than 400 million dump trucks of concrete is transported to construction sites. Every man, woman, and child on the planet “consumes” around forty times their own weight in concrete per year. Which is, of course, an average—for residents of the Western world, it’s much more, despite the fact that around half the world’s concrete production and consumption today is accounted for by China.

Entire cities have grown into icons in concrete. Where did so many modern buildings in New York City come from? Glaciers and Long Island. In 1865, mining began on the northern shore of Long Island to collect sand washed out from retreating ice age glaciers. Immigrant workers from Europe, many from Sardinia, first hauled sand with wheelbarrows; the excavations grew with mechanization, and eventually the cliffs and the landscape were leveled. Port Washington was the center of the business, as endless convoys of barges carried the sand to Manhattan. The last sandpit closed in the 1990s, by which time more than 200 million tons of sand had been excavated to build the city—bridges, highways, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the World Trade Center. As Al Marino, a worker in the pits, is quoted as saying: “The sand we got in the Port Washington sandbanks is fantastic. . . . It has life in it. It’s the best sand you could get for making concrete—just the right combination of coarse and fine grains. You go to the beach and you take that sand. And if you make concrete out of that it would fall apart, because there’s no life in it” (Elly Shodell, Port Washington Public Library). The construction of Kennedy Airport took over two million dump trucks of sand from Jamaica Bay at the other end of Long Island—a big hole in the sediment budget.

Concrete is used in the construction of prosaic and functional buildings—and in fine architecture, from Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona (sometimes likened to a sand castle) to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Even Gehry’s soaring sculptures in metal and glass need concrete to frame and underpin them.

Common and basic though it is, concrete lends itself to technological innovation. Traditional additives have made it faster curing, lighter weight, stronger, and resistant to corrosion, and there are some extraordinary modern developments. Among Thomas Edison’s many visions was one of cheap and simple concrete housing construction; his ideas were, again, ahead of their time, with public enthusiasm notably lacking, but his company did provide the concrete for New York’s Yankee Stadium. Today, materials science has taken up the challenge, and if you soak old newspapers and magazines to make papier-mâché, then mix it with sand and cement, you have fibrous cement, a building material that is lightweight, cheap, strong, and capable of being sprayed or sawed. The material is highly fire resistant and, because of the structure of the sand grains and fibers, has excellent insulating and thermal properties.

Add even small amounts of steel or carbon fibers to concrete and it will conduct electricity—it becomes a material with the ability to monitor itself. A road made of conductive concrete can be warmed up, using electrical heating, to prevent the formation of ice, averting the use of sand or salt. Traditional concrete is brittle and cracks easily; modern concretes can be flexible, again through the addition of fibers, and made translucent through the addition of glass optical fibers. Self-cleaning concrete, harnessing the chemical activity of titanium dioxide (itself often derived from sand), has been developed in Italy, and it seems that it could actually clean up polluted air: titanium dioxide becomes chemically reactive when exposed to light, absorbing pollutants.

Specialty concretes also figure on the domestic front. Colored and polished “designer” concrete has become the material of choice for kitchen floors and countertops, benches and desks, the constituent sand grains exposed, if desired, to provide the feeling of a beach or a sandstone. The results are stunning, but the customizing process is often labor-intensive and expensive.

The main problem with all types of concrete lies in its production, particularly in the manufacture of cement: cement making may account for up to 10 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Alternatives to cement have proved difficult but not impossible to develop, and recycling, particularly of glass, plays an increasingly important role in concrete manufacture. On many modern construction sites, gigantic machines can be seen imitating the processes of nature, spewing out the ground-up material from the demolition of a previous building to create artificial aggregate.

The use of sand in building extends far beyond the basics of construction. Key materials for decoration also rely on sand and its derivatives. For centuries, many types of plaster have used sand to provide cohesion. I looked closely at the remarkably preserved plaster surface of the walls of a Roman temple in a Saharan oasis, and the light caught the coarse grains of embedded sand. A professional microscopic analysis of the sand grains in the plaster of ancient churches will yield stories of their age and construction. The delicate art of frescoes relies on the layering of plaster with increasingly finer sand content—the sand must be angular to maximize its binding effect.

Paint is a decorative material that seems far removed from sand, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Quartz sand, or silica (silicon dioxide), is the basic source of silicon, and silicon is a magic element, convertible both physically and chemically into a huge variety of useful substances. Ground to a microscopically fine powder, silica is used as a filler to control the physical properties of various products and to add bulk to them. Among these products are plastics, rubber, adhesives—and paint, the chemical inertness and hardness of silica making the paint more durable. Perhaps the simplest decorative application of silica is smalt, a coating long used to provide the background to painted lettering on signs; its base is either ground-up colored glass or simply sand, with pigment added.

Silicones—complex synthetic, silicon-based molecules—are the key ingredients in specialty paints. Silicones in general are remarkable materials and play a vast number of roles in our lives, in cookware, sealants, cosmetics (see personal care and pharmaceuticals), and anatomical augmentations, to name a few.

White paint, whether gleaming on your kitchen appliances or coating the White House, owes its whiteness to titanium dioxide, which was substituted some time ago for toxic white lead as a pigment. The titanium is extracted from the minerals rutile and ilmenite (oxides of titanium and titanium and iron), which are mined as sand grains concentrated naturally by ancient rivers and waves (see jewelry). More than half the titanium dioxide manufactured goes into paint; some of the rest goes into toothpaste, sunscreen (it blocks ultraviolet rays), paper, inks, food coloring, and, as we have seen, clever concrete.

D is also for defense, not only in a military sense—of hot sand poured onto the enemy from castle battlements and the construction of earthworks and trenches—but in the sense of defending against the forces of nature. Sandbags have been used as emergency barriers against floods for centuries. Massive sandbags were used to plug gaps in the levees caused by Hurricane Katrina—unfortunately, after the major flooding had already occurred. Improvements on the traditional technology of flood-proof barriers have been developed, but the majority of them are still filled with sand.

Of course, sand can not only keep out water but smother fire too. It also provides a defense against termites, which are unable to tunnel through loose coarse sand; under houses or foundations, around fence posts and telephone poles, sand forms an effective barrier.

Electronics. Where to start (and stop) on a subject that could fill a book in itself? Perhaps with a common oversimplification. “Sand to chips” is a popular conception and, indeed, in many ways it is as simple as that. The chips—the microprocessors in our computers, microwave ovens, mobile phones, and endless other electronic devices—are based on silicon, and silicon—a lot of it at least—comes from sand. But only from quartz sand, and only after undergoing an incredibly sophisticated and complex series of processes to make silicon of the purity required for electronics. You can, if you wish, make silicon at home, using a crude imitation of the real extraction process: heat a mixture of quartz-rich beach sand and magnesium powder to a considerable temperature; the magnesium tears the oxygen atoms away from the silicon and among the detritus in the bottom of your test tube will be some silicon—although it will be extremely impure. Electronics-grade silicon has to be at least 99.99999 percent pure—referred to in the trade as the “seven nines”—and often it’s more nines than that. In general, we are talking of one lonely atom of something that is not silicon among billions of silicon companions.

Then there’s the weird chemical behavior of silicon. Oxygen atoms have an immensely calming effect on it; silicon dioxide in the form of quartz, as we have seen, is one of the most durable substances on Earth. But silicon on its own, a brittle, gray, metallic material, is chemically promiscuous, reacting vigorously with almost anything. So why is silicon the material for making computer chips? The answer lies in another of its strange properties: it is a semiconductor. Most materials either conduct electricity or don’t. (The latter are insulators, of which glass, primarily made of silica, is, ironically, an excellent example.) Silicon is one of the rare materials that is neither wholly a conductor nor wholly an insulator; it conducts electricity only under certain circumstances, which, importantly, can be controlled. Silicon is prepared to accept into its structure atoms of other substances that determine its electrical conductivity, and those foreign atoms can be introduced artificially (a process called doping); hence its role in electronics.

Clearly, when a substance of such extraordinary purity is required, the purer the starting material, the better—which is why any old sand won’t do. So what are the sources of the raw materials? In thinking about this book, I had in mind the geological perspective—what are the origins of the sand grains that provided the means to enable the computer on which I am writing? A simple question, but surprisingly difficult to answer. First of all, the public is understandably more interested in the technology of making the silicon chip than in its provenance in a sandbank by a river somewhere. Second, the absolute volume of semiconductor-grade silicon is only a small fraction of all silicon production. But more important, a small number of companies around the world dominate the technology and the market, and while their literature and websites go into considerable and helpful detail on their products, the location and nature of the raw materials seem to be of “strategic value,” and thus an industrial secret. I sought the help of the U.S. Geological Survey, which produces comprehensive annual reports on silica and silicon (as well as all other industrial minerals), noting that statistics pertaining to semiconductor-grade silicon metal were often excluded or “withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data.” The survey staff were, as always, extremely helpful, but were themselves perplexed that such an apparently simple question was not simple to answer. They put me on the trail of a number of sources, but telephone and e-mail inquiries did not shed a great deal of light. What I could deduce is this: the common source of silica for manufacturing the high-purity grades of silicon used for, among other things, silicon chips is not loose, unconsolidated sand from a beach or river sandbank, but sand that has already been ultrapurified by nature: quartzite.

Quartzite is a rock that was originally a silica sandstone; it has been so deeply buried in the Earth’s crust, cooked by such high temperatures and pressures, that many of the impurities have been distilled out and the sand grains completely annealed and welded together. Hit quartzite with a hammer and it rings like a bell because of its hardness, purity, and uniformity. Hit it hard enough and it breaks across the ghosts of the grains, not around them. Quartzite can be well over 99 percent pure silica. Grind it up to a powder of a consistent grain size and it’s a good starting point for making silicon.

As we saw in chapter 7, the story of the Appalachians is divided into three dramatic episodes of mountain building, separated by periods of major erosion and sediment deposition. During the dramatic episodes, sands were buried and cooked into quartzites; during the interim periods, those quartzites were elevated to the surface and eroded. Rivers carried pebbles of quartzite down from the mountains, to be buried and once again lithified. Today, rivers carry quartzite pebbles, along with sand, gravel, and mud, out of the heart of the Appalachians, down toward the sea, as we saw in chapter 4. The Coosa River, for example, originates close to the border of Georgia and Tennessee and, together with its tributaries, drains a large and geologically diverse area of Appalachian rocks, including quartzites. It crosses from Georgia into Alabama, where it joins the Tallapoosa to become the Alabama River. As it does so, it enters the broad coastal plain, slows down, and dumps its sediment load. Large volumes of aggregates for all kinds of industrial purposes are extracted in this part of the country from the sediments of the Coosa and other rivers, but among those everyday aggregates are pebbles of great value—pure quartzites from the kitchens of the Appalachians. And those, I believe, are one source of raw material for high-grade silicon. So it’s true that computer chips are made from sand—but sand that was first deposited several hundred million years ago.

Only slightly less pure than the “seven nines” material, so-called metallurgical-grade silicon has a host of uses, being an ingredient in specialty steels, alloys of aluminum, and silicones. To make this high-purity silicon, powdered quartzite is burnt with charcoal or wood at temperatures over 1,700°C (3,000°F); the oxygen atoms are seduced into eloping with the carbon (uniting to form carbon dioxide) in sequential steps of ever-increasing purification. A minute fraction of a batch of metallurgical-grade silicon is subjected to the ultimate purification. The specific technologies are highly proprietary, but the common method is to make the silicon into a liquid, convert the liquid to a gas, purify the gas, and condense it into the “seven nines” material—polysilicon. Further steps are then needed to fashion it into formats for solar cells or the brain of your microwave oven. Much of today’s production of basic silicon metal is done in China.

Pure silicon is the prime ingredient for tens of thousands of substances with hundreds of thousands of uses, yet it still requires an energy-intensive and polluting technology that has been used for thousands of years: smelting. Is there no better way? Research into using nanotechnology or low-temperature chemical catalytic approaches demonstrates that there are, indeed, better ways, and ways that can even be based on everyday sand. And what of silicon itself—are there substitutes? While there is no shortage of sand or quartzite, there are competing demands for and a limited supply of high-purity silicon. And the silicon chip itself, while constantly being improved, is not perfect—it has limitations in terms of efficiency and energy loss. Two of the major corporate players have recently announced that the element hafnium performs better than silicon in this application, losing less power and allowing smaller and smaller chips. Hafnium? It’s a some-what obscure element of, so far, limited application—worldwide production is only around fifty tons per year, much of which goes into control rods in nuclear power plants and the rest into sophisticated super alloys for jet engines. And from where do we get hafnium? It occurs in partnership with its sister element, zirconium, in the mineral zircon, which is extracted from sand (see jewelry).

The manufacture of silicon uses the ancient technology of the foundry: smelting. Sand has historically played a key role in foundries, providing a material for casting the metal. Sand, combined with clay or chemical binders, is shaped around a pattern so as to contain the hollow form into which the molten metal is poured, and sand “cores” are used to form recesses and cavities in the final metal shape. After casting, the cores, along with the rest of the sand forming the cast, are simply removed. This is an application where round sand grains seem to be best, selected for the appropriate size. High-precision casting can be achieved this way, and while other technologies have been developed, this age-old method continues to be used today.

Among the many valuable qualities of sand are its ability to contain fluids, its porosity (see reservoir), and the ease with which fluids flow through it—its permeability. The unit of measurement that is used to describe the permeability of sand is the darcy, and the process of fluid flowing through sand operates according to Darcy’s law. Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy lived a short life, from 1803 to 1858, but he revolutionized the engineering of municipal water supplies. He was employed by the French Corps of Bridges and Roads and ultimately became its inspector general. He was personally responsible for designing and building a radical new water-supply system for the city of Dijon, the construction of which depended on his quantification of the physics of fluid flow. In the course of this, he analyzed and put to use the behavior of sand as an effective filter, studying how the spaces between the grains capture solid materials but allow the clean water to flow through. Water treatment plants (as well as septic tanks and swimming pools) all over the world still depend on sand as a filter. The filtering process often uses additional materials, such as carbon and other chemicals, but it’s the sand that provides the basis for the job.

When lethal levels of natural arsenic were found in shallow domestic water wells not long ago in Nepal, Bangladesh, and other parts of Asia, the solution was sand filtration: “slow sand” filters, with iron oxide coating the grains, and “bio-sand” filters, cheap, simple and requiring no electricity, removed the arsenic. In Australia, iron-rich sand grains have been found to contain tiny pits as a result of natural weathering; the pits, just nanometers across (a million nanometers equal four hundredths of an inch) are exactly the right size to capture industrial chemical pollutants. Old principles, new technology (see nanotechnology).

Glass: the stone that flows. The technology of glassmaking is an ancient one. The earliest glassworks yet discovered were recently excavated in the Nile Delta; they date from around 1250 B.C., when Rameses the Great ruled the empire. But the belief that the technology originated in Egypt is wrong, as is, sadly, Pliny the Elder’s satisfying fairy tale of serendipitous discovery. He describes, in his Natural History, how Phoenician traders with a cargo of natron—or soda (sodium carbonate)—perhaps from the desert lakes of the Sahara, had put in for the night on the eastern Mediterranean coast. Unable to find adequate rocks to support their cooking pots over the fire, they resorted to using some blocks of their cargo. Whatever their dinner recipe was, they had unwittingly assembled the ingredients for glass: the soda lowered the melting point of the beach sand, and out of the fire flowed streams of translucent liquid. While this story is undoubtedly apocryphal, the discovery of glass was probably a similarly serendipitous conspiracy of circumstances, but in Mesopotamia. Simple glass beads from around 2300 B.C. have been found in Iraq and Syria and in the Caucasus. The technology developed rapidly from there.

Glass beads were the earliest products of this technology, simple but nevertheless of an infinite variety of colors and designs, used for decorating, purchasing, and warding off evil. The age of exploration of the New World and the requirements for gifts and barter with the indigenous inhabitants stimulated a major industrial expansion. Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés carried large quantities of beads in their cargoes. For the Hudson’s Bay Company, beads were the basic currency of the fur trade, and even though the story of beads being bartered for Manhattan is probably untrue, William Penn did use beads to seal the agreement on the land that would become Philadelphia. Tragically, currency in glass beads also drove the slave trade. Much of this industry was based in Venice, a glassmaking center now for over a millennium. By the 1800s, the city’s manufacturers were exporting more than six million pounds of glass beads every year.

The development of glass is a tangled tale of chemistry, alchemy, invention, secrecy, serendipity, ideas, needs, breakthroughs, and the geology of the raw materials. To melt sand on its own requires temperatures in excess of 1,600°C (2,900°F), far beyond the capability of traditional wood-burning furnaces. The melting point has to be lowered to a practicable temperature, and this is where the natron plays its critical part in the story. Soda has a much lower melting point than sand and acts as a flux, an additive that makes silica sand meltable at realistically achievable temperatures. An alternative to natron, which is gathered from dried-out lakes, is the ash obtained from burning certain plants or seaweed, and some species from the eastern Mediterranean were found to be ideal. But care must be taken: too much flux and the resulting glass is unstable, and adding even the necessary quantity of flux makes the glass soluble in water, hardly a desirable characteristic. To stabilize the glass, calcium in the form of powdered limestone has to be added, and it is entirely possible that this was first discovered by accident through using silica sand that also contained fragments of seashells. The resulting concoction is soda-lime glass, the everyday kind of glass that has been used for the last three thousand years. To this brew, other components can be usefully added, each conferring its own special characteristics.

Though colorless and completely transparent glass is today the norm, colored glass is often desirable, as long as the color can be managed and predicted. Adding gold in very small concentrations creates a deep ruby color; cobalt produces blue; copper oxide, turquoise; and pure copper, a dark red, opaque glass. Add a myriad of other minor, special ingredients, and the physical character of the glass, its optical, thermal, and electrical properties and its strength, are profoundly changed. It is this chemical sleight of hand that makes for the magic of glass.

It also determined where the centers of glassmaking developed: all these natural ingredients had to be sourced, and the major glassmaking centers developed where the materials were available through local supplies or through easy trade (which also provided an export route). Venice is perhaps the prime example of the influence of supply and trade. Visit the city today and you are assaulted on every side by shop windows offering a dazzling, but commonly garish, display of glass. Today, many of these wares are no longer actually made in Venice, but for centuries it was the glassmaking capital of the Western world. In 1291, the already long-established guilds and manufacturers moved offshore, to the island of Murano. This not only freed the city from the threat of fire from the furnaces, but also allowed a cloak of industrial secrecy to settle around the jealously guarded tricks of the trade. The death penalty was imposed on tradesmen who leaked the island’s secrets.

The source of their silica was an open secret, however. In northwestern Italy, the river Ticino flows out of the Alps past Milan. The Ticino carries, torn from the heart of the Alps and tumbled, ground, cleaned, and scrubbed by the river, quartz sand, gravel, and pebbles that are unusually pure—like those of the Coosa River of Alabama. It was the pebbles, the cagoli, that the glassmakers treasured.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, Angelo Barovier, one of the artisans of Murano, by carefully sourcing and purifying his ingredients, created a revolutionary product: crystallo, or crystal glass. It was the first truly colorless, transparent glass, and its optical properties were superior to anything that had been produced before. Transparent glass created an explosion of technology, fueling the scientific revolution of the Renaissance through microscopes, telescopes, and the laboratory. Transparency also vastly improved the quality of windows.

Today, when Venetians do make their own glass, they no longer use the cagoli of the Ticino River, but rather turn, like many glassmakers, to the forests outside Paris for their raw material. A visitor to Fontainebleau (where Napoleon abdicated—twice) might be drawn there by the magnificence of its château, but other treasures lie in its forest. Around thirty-five million years ago, a warm sea inundated much of northwestern Europe, and this sea retreated and returned over and over again. To the southeast, the Alps were still forming, rising from the forces of Africa crushing into old Europe. As from time immemorial, while the mountains rose, the elements chastised them for doing so, eating into the newly exposed rocks, eroding and destroying them. The cagoli headed south, but other debris from the Alps was carried northwestward by rivers to the encroaching sea, along the way grinding and sorting the sand that would be disgorged into the sea at the river’s end. This sand was then caught up in the dynamic coastal processes we saw in chapter 5, all the time being cleaned and winnowed. As the sea made its final retreat, these sands were left stranded, and they are preserved today as the Fontainebleau sandstone. The rivers and the sea had done a fine job of cleaning the sand, but water later percolating through it leached out even more of the impurities, leaving huge tracts of sand that can be over 30 meters (100 ft) thick, fine, white, clean, and all of roughly same-sized grains—in other words, ideal for making glass. Fontainebleau has long been one of the premier glass sands in the world and today is a focus of major international glassmaking companies.

The important characteristics of a sand suitable for making glass are that it should have a high silica content and as few impurities as possible. Silica sand is rarely pure; the most common pollutant is iron, which, even in minute quantities, coats the grains, producing a variety of yellow and green colors in the glass (which can be reduced by adding manganese); even modern sheet glass often looks green from the side. For everyday glass, a typical proportion of silica sand grains would be 97 percent. For more sophisticated applications, such as for ophthalmic glass, the raw material must be 99.7 percent silica and contain less than 0.013 percent iron oxide.

In the United States, crumbling mountains and winnowed beaches allowed the first small glassmaking enterprise to be set up in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608. It was established primarily to manufacture trading beads, but it soon fell victim to famine. Glassmaking didn’t really take off until 1739, when Caspar Wistar (whose grandson we met in chapter 7, presenting a dinosaur bone for George Washington to examine) opened a factory in New Jersey, where there was an abundance of clean, ocean-washed sand, forests to fuel the furnaces and provide potash, and oyster shells to supply the calcium. The technology’s secrets were still well guarded, and the British would not permit their own glass experts to emigrate. German glassblowers, brought over by Wistar, himself an immigrant from Germany, provided the expertise that began the American industry. And it is now a huge industry. The United States consumes well over eleven million tons of glass sand every year, the majority of it for everyday containers and plate glass, but also significant quantities for more sophisticated applications. Major glass manufacturers have tens of thousands of specialty products.

Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin have written, in The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World, a compelling social history of glass, and they invite the reader to imagine a world without it. The evolution of the modern sciences would have been impossible without microscopes, telescopes, and laboratory vessels; as they write, “glass transformed humankind’s relation with the natural world.” How could Copernicus and Galileo have observed, imagined, and described as they did, and how could their theories have been tested, without glass? How could Antony van Leeuwenhoek have seen his miniature worlds? Passing an electric current through a wire and making it glow is simple, but it’s not a lightbulb until it can be enclosed in a thin transparent glass container, strong enough to contain a vacuum and prevent the air from destroying the filament. Medicine, photography, cars, computers, television, navigation, laboratories, long-distance communication, mirrors, spectacles, the Hubble telescope, art, fine glasses for fine wine—the list is endless. As Cinderella’s slipper and Alice’s looking glass opened up new worlds for them, so does glass for us.

The hourglass: symbol of time, a satisfying conspiracy of sand, glass, and the physics of granular materials. There are records of “sandglasses” in ships’ inventories from the fourteenth century, and it was the development of marine navigation that required them as a means of accurately measuring intervals of passing time. The technology of the marine compass seems to have arisen in Italy, quite possibly borrowed from much older Chinese instrumentation, and it is likely that Italian glass craftsmanship led to the design of an accurate sandglass. (One is depicted in Siena frescoes from 1338.) Until the needs of navigation, time had been of only relative concern and water clocks had served most purposes. In the often freezing European climate, however, water was hardly ideal, and relying, as such a device did, on a stable base for a consistent flow, it certainly would not work on board a ship. Sandglasses are essentially unaffected by heat, cold, and movement, and they were therefore ideal for nautical purposes, sometimes being referred to as “sea clocks.”

Sea clock hourglasses came in two different versions, though neither of them ran for an hour. The thirty-second version measured the interval during which knots at measured intervals in a rope running out astern from the vessel were counted, thereby giving the speed—in knots. The thirty-minute version monitored the crew’s shifts (“watches”), each one consisting of eight half-hours.

The glass needs to be made with extreme accuracy, and its slope should equal the angle of repose of the sand. The ratio between the size of the hole through which the sand flows and the size of the grains is critical—get it wrong and the sand will jam and not flow smoothly. In chapter 2, we saw how the pressure directly under a pile of sand is reduced through the formation of structures of arched chains of grains, and it is this behavior that allows a sandglass to work without clogging. Fine natural sand was often used but was not ideal; thus ground-up eggshells, metallic sand, and other materials were substituted. Complex sandglasses were made of several reservoirs so that fractions of a time interval could be measured. Hourglasses were, of course, superseded by the invention of accurate clocks. However, Queen Victoria is reported to have had one installed on the pulpit of her church: her sermon tolerance was said to have been twenty minutes. We still use them today, inefficiently, for timing board games and cooking eggs. They are collector’s items—and their imagery is ancient and modern. There was a time when an hourglass was placed in a coffin as a (perhaps unnecessary) reminder that the sands of time had run out, and they have been popular symbols on gravestones. The classic opening of a long-running soap opera features an hourglass and the words, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of our Lives.” And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in “Happiness,” “Whoever looks at an hourglass sees the dissolution of an empire.”

The largest hourglass in the world is at the Nima Sand Museum in Japan, built to celebrate the local “singing sands.” It contains a ton of sand and is turned at midnight on December 31 each year.

Islands, artificial ones made of sand. Building artificial islands for a variety of purposes—agriculture, bridges, lighthouses—is nothing new, and sand has always been the most available material. Dredging operations need somewhere to deposit the spoils, and creating new land is an obvious solution. Balboa Island, off Newport Beach, California; Harbor Island, near Seattle; and the Venetian Islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida, were all created in this way. Harbor Island, designated as the largest artificial island in the world at the time of its construction in 1909, lost its title in 1939 when Treasure Island surfaced from the waters of San Francisco Bay to support the Golden Gate International Exposition.

Today, where to put dredged material has become more of a challenge. Every year, more than 200,000 dump truck loads of sand and mud need to be dredged from shipping channels to keep the port of Baltimore open for business, and the problem of where to put it has become acute. Reclaiming islands in the Chesapeake Bay that have suffered from erosion (see chapter 4) is one possibility; constructing an entirely new island in the bay is another. While the Chesapeake authorities tend to frown on such ideas, island-building projects are underway around the world. For example, two new islands are being planned off the coast of Israel—one for a new airport, the other for homes, businesses, and recreation. Understandably, there is considerable debate as to their impact on natural sand movement and changes to patterns of erosion and deposition. However, by far the most grandiose projects have been taking place in Dubai (the home of the world’s only beach whose sand is temperature-controlled by a system of buried pipes).

Despite the admonishment of Matthew 7:26, there is, in principle, nothing wrong with building on sand—as the proportion of the world’s population living on coasts demonstrates, both historically and today. From an engineering perspective, well-compacted, well-drained, level sand provides an excellent base. But building on sand that is vulnerable to liquefaction should be avoided, as should participation in nature’s game of moving sand. Certainly, the powers-that-be in Dubai, for any number of reasons, have no inclination to heed the words of Matthew; what they are doing can only be described as mind-boggling.

In the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf, unimaginable volumes of sand are being dredged and formed into vast complexes of artificial islands, redefining the term megaproject. Three projects are nearing completion, one is underway, and the largest is still being planned. Their stated purpose is to solve Dubai’s lack of shoreline—and to provide expensive new real estate. Three of the complexes are shaped like palm trees and will together add 520 kilometers (320 mi) of shoreline—many times the current length. The fourth is “The World” (the project itself has been named the eighth wonder thereof), an artificial archipelago of three hundred islands forming a map of the world and selling for an average of $30 million per island. The World covers an area about half the size of Manhattan and is built from enough sand (325 million cubic meters, or 425 million cubic yards) to make the concrete to build several hundred Pentagons. The next project, still on the drawing board, is reported to be named “The Universe”—although it will, modestly, depict only the solar system.

Dubai is situated on the edge of the Arabian Desert, and so sand supplies would not seem to be a problem. But desert sand, the grains rounded and smoothed by the wind, will not do. To create islands that cohere, the sand must be angular—marine sand. Gigantic dredgers rip sand from the sea floor of the Persian Gulf and “rainbow” it from huge hoses into position until, in The World, France, Greenland, California, and Los Angeles (these last two are separate islands) rise above sea level. The sand then suffers “vibro-compaction” in preparation for major construction projects. Dubai has now essentially exhausted its marine sand resource, with effects on the marine environment that have yet to be seen. The whole archipelago is surrounded by a breakwater whose volumetric statistics are similarly biblical. This and the other breakwaters around the Palm complexes completely change water and sediment circulation. The construction of buildings and infrastructure on the islands is in its early stages, but the scale of what is planned—dozens of luxury high-rise hotels, offices, recreational facilities, and housing—will certainly test Matthew 7:26.

When the wicked fairy waves her wand, keep an eye on your jewelry—that family heirloom, the several-carat diamond mounted in gold, could vanish.

A few years ago, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mine worker was digging in a narrow, deep pit in the sand, hauling bucketfuls to the surface, when out of the sand emerged a 265.82-carat diamond. The typical diamonds from the mine were less than a carat; this was a monster, and its ultimate value remains shrouded in the secrecy that still characterizes this often ethically dubious business. The diamond had arrived there after a long journey from its birthplace in the immense pressures deep within the Earth, having been violently jetted upward through the crust, eroded, and tumbled along riverbeds to its resting place. As we have seen, the composition of sands betrays their origins, and if they came from the crumbling of precious mineral deposits, then they will contain precious minerals. The rivers—and often waves and ocean currents—winnow the sands, concentrating grains according to their weight. The dark smears on beach ripples are formed this way, as were Thomas Edison’s Long Island black sands (chapter 5)—and the Congo diamond deposits. These naturally concentrated sandy deposits of valuable minerals are called placers and are economically vital.

California was founded on placer sands: forty-niners during the Gold Rush sought the metal not only in subsurface mines, but in the streams and rivers that drained the gold-bearing ores. Panning the stream sediments was backbreaking work, and so a technological breakthrough was called for. It happened in the form of hydraulic mining: miners used high-powered water hoses to erode the valley sides. The gold, being heavier than the rest of the dirt, collected in sluices, and everything else drained away. It has been estimated that over a twenty-year period 750 million dump truck loads of sand, mud, and gravel were dumped into the Central Valley—with dire environmental consequences.

Placer mining is an old technology. An ingenious early method (probably used in ancient Egypt) employed a fleece bag, the woolen side facing inward: water and sediment were passed through the bag, and the heavy gold flakes became embedded in the wool, remaining behind when the bag was emptied of lighter sand and gravel. A similar method was still being used in the mountains of the Caucasus in the 1930s; it also explains Jason and his Golden Fleece.

Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, garnets, and gold are mined from placer sands in many parts of the world; in places like Namibia, beaches have been stripped to bedrock in the search for precious gemstones. These glamorous minerals are not, however, the only vital products of placer deposits. Concentrated iron-rich sands (richer versions of Edison’s Long Island sand, or Petrus van Muschenbroek’s “Magnetick-sand” [chapter 1]) are found worldwide and have long been used as the raw material for steel making. The finest-quality ceremonial Japanese swords have always been forged directly from satestu, iron sand. The iron and steel industry of New Zealand’s North Island is based on iron-rich beach placers (whose titanium content initially presented a challenge to blast furnace technology). While the natural processes of concentration can create a health threat when the minerals are radioactive (as on some beaches in India), platinum, tungsten, titanium, tin, niobium, zirconium, and other vital elements are all sourced from placers (see also x, y, and z). To detail where we would be without these elements would take another book.

In 2004, a convoy of dump trucks crossed from South to North Korea and returned, completing a deeply symbolic journey: the first commercial trade across the land border since 1950. Their return cargo? Sand. Today, sand is imported nearly continuously into South Korea, mainly for cement production.

International trade in sand would hardly seem to constitute significant commerce—after all, everyone has sand—but it does, because often the right kind of sand is in the wrong place. Not only is Dubai’s abundant desert sand too round for its artificial islands; it’s not the right kind of sand to build its golf courses: that has to be imported. Saudi Arabia bans the export of silica sand and imports specialty products such as Australian garnet-rich placer sand for sandblasting. Sand is a major commodity in international trade; in some parts of the world, it is sufficiently valuable that cross-border disputes are common and sand smuggling is a thriving business.

The construction boom in China has stimulated massive illegal sand dredging, damaging river systems and increasing flood risk; beaches have all but disappeared from some Hong Kong islands. Singapore is a crowded, but hardly sand-rich, country, and so land reclamation projects are big business. For some time, Singapore has been at loggerheads with neighboring Indonesia over illegal, often nocturnal, dredging of Indonesian sand for smuggling into Singapore. One of Indonesia’s islands close to the border has almost disappeared—creating potential implications as to where the border will be. Indonesia has banned sand exports, and its naval patrols enforce the ban. Singapore’s access to Malaysian sand became the contentious bargaining chip in negotiations over a new bridge between the two countries.

Regrettably, illegal sand mining is a criminal, economic, and environmental problem in many parts of the world.

From beaches to golf courses, deserts to gardens, sand contributes significantly to our leisure activities—it provides the setting and material for having fun.

Let’s begin with the beach. Simply lying on the beach or making a sand castle by hand is not enough for some; there has always been a major industry in beach equipment and paraphernalia. Buckets, spades, sand-carving tools, and shapers are the basics, but there are more sophisticated items. In 1903, the leading item of the Wolverine Supply and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was “Sandy Andy.” One of a now classic series of brightly painted tin and steel toys, Sandy Andy was a tower from which a sand hopper filled a small truck that then rushed down, emptied itself, and rushed back up again. Production continued at least until the 1950s, but the early versions are collector’s items. Since, by their very nature, they are often damaged by weathering, sand abrasion, and overuse, there is a debate whether, in terms of their value, demonstrable use or pristineness is to be treasured more. Toys where pouring sand is the driving mechanism are sold today—made, of course, from plastic.

Sand provided the surface for the aerial adventures of the Wright brothers, car racing, and land speed records, and today it lends its qualities to a variety of beach sports. Virtually every sport can be played on the beach—perhaps most popularly soccer and volleyball. Sand yachting, sailing, or boating events take place on beaches all over the world, in a variety of vehicles, in which the driver stands or sits while hurtling along under the power of the wind. Sand kiting involves attaching yourself to a large kite with oversized skates strapped to your feet. Sand skiing is exactly that—cross-country skiing on sand. The physical character of the sand is all-important, as is the nature of the snow in the original activity. The analogy between snow and sand has also resulted in the popular sport of sandboarding, which takes place down the slopes of sand dunes. Sandboarding has become a major international sport, the basis for schools, television shows, magazines, internet communities, and new technologies to overcome friction and abrasion.

And once the sands are opened to the internal combustion engine, it’s a whole new and often bizarre world. Open a copy of Sand Sports magazine and the scale of these activities becomes apparent—roaring out of the pages are custom vehicles of every kind, from motorbikes and snowmobiles to drag racers and anything else on four wheels, many of which could come straight out of a (dystopian?) science-fiction film. Large tracts of the world’s sand are scoured and redistributed by these sand sports on a daily basis.

The beach has also provided a medium for political advertising: during recent French election campaigns, flip-flops were handed out, the soles of which imprinted in the sand, with every step, the initials of a political party. And we mustn’t forget that sand was the stuff on which the bodybuilding empire of Charles Atlas was founded.

Sand toys are not limited to the beach or the sandbox, the beach in the garden. Sand art, sand sculpting, and sand magic toys (the latter often based on the physics of granular materials) are widely available, as are meditative “executive desk toys” of cascading colored sands.

Sporting surfaces from baseball to cricket rely on sand, and newly developed sand-based materials for horse-racing tracks and equestrian arenas are credited with reducing injury and loss of life. Simply mixed with crumbled rubber from old tires or as part of a manufactured fiber-reinforced product, sand is a key ingredient in such surfaces.

The thermal properties of sand provide for its role in cooking, from a buried pig at a Hawaiian luau to a Bedouin rabbit, from the Iroquois popping corn in heated sand to Chinese vendors roasting nuts in sand-filled woks. When the cooking is finished, the pot can be effectively cleaned with sand. The thermal approach is skipped altogether in Iceland, where shark meat is simply buried in sand for several months until it rots, after which it is dried; it is, apparently, an acquired taste.

Cooling, rather than heating, is the basis for the remarkable invention of Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher. He simply put one locally made terra-cotta pot inside another and filled the space between them with water and sand. Slow evaporation of the water, combined with the insulating properties of the sand, provided a cheap refrigerator requiring no electricity. Fresh vegetables could be kept for weeks rather than days. Abba’s “pot-in-pot” is a stunning example of the simplest technology having a profound impact; the implications for the health and welfare of rural communities made this the winner of a Time magazine “Inventions of the Year” award in 2001. A pot sells for forty cents.

Abba’s invention is possibly stretching the definition of leisure, but then so is the Marathon des Sables, perhaps the most extraordinary association of sand with sport. The world’s most grueling footrace, the marathon covers, over six days, 240 kilometers (150 mi) across the Moroccan Sahara Desert. You need a few thousand dollars and a medical certificate to compete in this event, but in 2007 more than eight hundred men and women from all over the world entered (and most finished); two Moroccan brothers have dominated the event for ten years, typically finishing in under eighteen hours.

And, finally, if you have leisure time on your hands, try playing with the Falling Sand Game on the internet.

M is for mummies, music, and morphing, an eclectic combination, but each entertaining in its own way. The role of sand in mummification results from its character as an effective desiccant. Bodies buried simply in hot, dry sand are naturally dried out and mummified. “Ginger,” whose body was wrapped in matting around 3200 B.C. and buried in the Egyptian sand, is a permanent resident of the British Museum and one of the oldest known mummies. Similar naturally desiccated mummies are found in Mexico, the Chinese Taklimakan Desert, and South America. A Chilean mummy is claimed to be much older than Ginger, and in Peru the naturally preserved remains of more than forty dogs have been excavated, buried in human cemeteries.

Sand effectively dries out a body but leaves the skin taut and brittle. It was to address this aesthetic problem that the ancient Egyptians developed the art of artificial mummification, using, among other materials, natron (soda from dried-up lake beds in the desert). It may have been for this purpose that Pliny’s apocryphal traders were transporting natron when they invented glass. The Egyptians also used tar in the embalming process—the Arabic for “tar” is mummiya, but the term may have arisen through a misunderstanding, the dark, resinous-looking skin being mistaken for tar. Some of the tar used for mummification in Egypt has been identified (using biomarkers) as coming from the area of the Dead Sea (see the description of Sodom and Gomorrah in chapter 2) or from Gebel Zeit (which means “oil mountain” in Arabic), on the coast of the Gulf of Suez, close to modern oil and gas production (see reservoir); these natural tar occurrences commonly take the form of sand saturated with tar or bitumen. The wealthier the client, the less sand and more extravagant preservatives were used in Egyptian mummification: the poor had to rely on nature. Sand continued to play its desiccating role in the preservation of bodies in Italian monasteries (into the nineteenth century) and the preparation of shrunken heads, and is used today in laboratories and for drying flowers.

In music, sand is the sound producer in various rhythm instruments, such as rattles and sand blocks. Leroy Anderson, the composer of many widely recognized pieces, such as “Sleigh Ride,” used sandpaper to evoke the sounds of soft-shoe dancers in his “Sandpaper Ballet.” Anderson was imitating the likes of Fred Astaire performing the “sand shuffle” and the sand-dancing repertoire of the British comedian and entertainer Tommy Cooper. The sounds of sand, real or electronic, continue to be heard in various modern compositions. And Brian Wilson, of Beach Boys fame, found inspiration at his grand piano by placing it in a large sandbox installed in his living room.

Morphing, in the medium of animation, special effects, an d computer graphics, exploits the fluid and shape-shifting character of sand. The Sand Castle (1977) is a delightful and whimsical work by Co Hoedeman, a Dutch-Canadian animator. The movie, which won an Academy Award for Best Short Animated Film, features the Sandman, a little character painstakingly constructed from wire, foam rubber, and sand, who emerges from the sand to create and sculpt a tribe of idiosyncratic sand creatures, each with its own function and shape to match. Together, they build their new home, the sand castle, the completion of which they celebrate enthusiastically—until the arrival of an uninvited guest, the wind.

And then, of course, there is the Sandman, one of the more sympathetic adversaries of Spider-Man from Marvel Comics and the third installment of the Spider-Man movies (2007), directed by Sam Raimi. The makers of the film immersed themselves in the physics of granular materials, developing algorithms to model flowing and blowing sand, shifting piles, and intergranular behaviors. In an interview for the Society of Digital Artists, Doug Bloom, the sand-effects supervisor, describes how they “decided the main idea was to give the sense that individual grains of sand have their own consciousness, and that they work together to form into a shape or to collapse.” This Sandman is anything but whimsical: having found his body converted into sand after a bad encounter with a top-secret beach experiment, he can shape and re-form himself at will, turn his hands into sand weapons, merge with natural sand (from Arizona), and create particularly nasty sandstorms. The result is central to the movie and an extraordinary tribute to the art of special effects—and the dramatic character of sand.

Nanotechnology and nanoengineering are the modern sciences of making incredibly small things behave in unusual ways and achieve remarkable feats. We are only beginning to sense what is possible using submicroscopic materials, and silicon, derived, as we know, from sand, has a key role to play. There are one billion nanometers in a meter. A typical human hair is 80,000 nanometers in thickness, and nanotechnology deals with individual particles that are smaller than a human cell. A nano-sized piece of material behaves in ways radically different from the material’s normal character, and this is the secret of many nanomaterials. For example, silica can be turned into an amorphous solid that contains minute holes, nanoscale pores, creating a huge internal surface area. The pores may be long and tube-like or like miniature cages, and into them and around them a variety of other molecules can be inserted. Such substances can create chemical tricks that previously seemed impossible, since they appear to run counter to the conventional laws of chemistry. A silica “aerogel” is the lightest (least dense) solid known, being 99.8 percent air. Silicon membranes have been created that, although strong, are only 15 nanometers thick and full of holes. These kinds of materials can serve as filters capable of removing individual molecules from polluted fluids; they are being used in biotechnology and as catalysts, for microchemistry, in ways that were once unthinkable.

Other applications are equally remarkable. Nanoparticles of silica referred to as “smart dust” can recognize specific molecules and offer the opportunity for robots the size of a grain of sand. Silica nanoparticles can provide the means of delivering cancer treatments, individual genes for gene therapy, and a host of other medical applications. A water-devouring silica nanofilm can keep your windshield clear without wipers. Nanoelectronics in computer chips, solar energy generation, and other applications promise step changes in size and efficiency. Nanotechnology also offers the possibility of inventing a nonpolluting concrete.

Medicine, biotechnology, electronics, construction, pollution monitoring and cleanup, smart fabrics, mineral extraction—the nanolist of applications goes on, and we have only just begun.

O is for ostrich—although, in spite of the common assumption and the adoption of the phrase into our language, ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand. The story goes that this myth originated, again, with the writings of Pliny the Elder, who described seeing an ostrich with its head entirely hidden in a bush. How this became translated into sand is unclear. Ostriches do, however, eat sand. They are occasionally observed with their heads on the ground ingesting pebbles and grit, and farmers will sometimes feed sand to the young birds. The grit is needed to assist with grinding food in their gizzards; indeed, many species of birds require sand or grit as a grinding supplement. It is often recommended that food put out during the winter for wild birds be sprinkled with a little sand.

Some worms and insects also consume sand—termites ingest sand from beneath the ground, carry it to the surface, and deposit it to build up their mounds. Analysis of termite hills has become a highly successful means of prospecting for mineral deposits, since the termites are sampling the geology at some depth. There is indeed gold in some of them thar hills.

People sometimes eat sand, a habit known as geophagy. Bizarre stories abound of such diets. An eighty-year-old woman in India is said to eat a kilogram of sand before breakfast. Japanese inhabitants of coral reef islands are said to have eliminated the need for doctors through eating the calcium-rich sand. All this is arguably patent nonsense, but pica, from the Latin for “magpie,” is the medical term for an appetite for nonnutritional substances; it is a medical disorder.

And, on the subject of substance abuse, in 1934 Ogden’s, a subsidiary of the Imperial Tobacco Company, issued a series of fifty cigarette cards on the theme of sand. Educational cards such as this, originating decades earlier in the United States as a means of putting to good use the card stiffener in a cigarette pack, became enormously popular. They are now collector’s items; my own set of “The Story of Sand” cards covers, quaintly and more briefly, many of the topics of this book.

The renowned porcelain of Sèvres contained a number of unique ingredients that differentiated it from Oriental and Meissen porcelains. One of these ingredients was sand from Fontainebleau, the world-class glass sand. Porcelain and all ceramics require some form of fine sand to provide strength and thermal properties. Think of the heat-resistant tiles of the space shuttles: they are made from silica fibers, together with a ceramic binder, that provide an extraordinary ability to dissipate heat.

So when the fairy waves her wand, bid farewell to the family china—and your personal care and pharmaceutical products, and much of the contents of your kitchen cupboards too. We have already seen the role of fine silica as a filler in paint, but it also serves to thicken many gels, creams, and pastes—which covers most cosmetics. Together with other silicon compounds, it’s a key ingredient in shampoos, conditioners, toothpaste, deodorants, nail polish, and so on. When added to a powder, silica products prevent caking and clogging and produce a well-behaved granular material. Pharmaceutical capsules, vitamin tablets, and powdered food products—cake mixes, flour, spices—take advantage of this.

Silica in various forms (particularly on a nanoscale) also plays a key role in the process of papermaking. The paper’s surface character, particularly its absorbency, is often the result of a coating of a silica product—inkjet papers rely on this (and the ink’s behavior is controlled by silica gel). Specialty silica and silicate papers refuse to burn at temperatures that melt copper. Less dramatically, cooks use silicone-impregnated parchment paper in baking. Unlike the petrochemical paraffin in waxed paper, silicone is both heat-resistant and inert.

Quicksand, as we know, is unpleasant stuff and hardly qualifies as something useful. But the artificial and controlled production of a sort of quicksand has a number of valuable industrial applications. If air or another gas is forced upward through a bed of sand, the particles separate and become like a fluid—technically called a fluidized bed. Think of a hot-air popcorn-making machine: the uncooked kernels are forced into suspension and the heat is evenly delivered, resulting in uniform, rather than occasionally burnt, popcorn. It’s the evenness that’s the key—early fluidized-bed technology exploited it to fluidize particles of a catalyst that broke down heavy petroleum molecules into more useful light ones, the dynamics of the fluidized bed ensuring maximum efficiency of the catalyst. The method is used today in a variety of chemical processes, including the manufacture of polythene, making gas from coal, and cleaning up contaminated particles.

But perhaps the most important application of fluidized beds of sand is in incineration—materials burn more easily and efficiently in a fluidized bed. Not only do coal and other conventional fuels burn more efficiently, but so does garbage—“refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF. Power generation that uses the technology creates fewer emissions and can be far more easily controlled than in traditional power stations. Fluidized-bed technology is also a way of generating hydrogen from methane for energy. Nanotechnology is increasingly teaming up with fluidized beds—most carbon nanotubes are created this way.

Perhaps you own an aquarium. If so, there’s a good chance that you are using fluidized-bed technology every day and can watch it in action: many of the filter systems for cleaning the water are fluidized beds.

How many people in the world rely on water supplies flowing or pumped from underground? Controversial though the matter may be, how many of us rely on oil and gas flowing or pumped from underground? These critical resources do not occur in subsurface lakes, rivers, or caverns; they inhabit the microscopic holes in buried rock, very often the spaces between sand grains. Any rock that, like a sponge, is sufficiently porous to hold significant amounts of water or hydrocarbons is called a reservoir.

If rain falling in the hills soaks into porous and permeable rock layers that are tilted, sloping down below the surface out into the plains, the water will follow those layers until they flatten out. As long as there are no ways in which it can leak out, there it will collect, under the pressure of the overlying rocks, waiting in the pore spaces until a hole is drilled in the layer, releasing the pressure. The water will then flow upward, creating a water well. The layer through which the water moves and in which it collects is also known as an aquifer, “water carrier” in Latin. The water that we extract can be still flowing through the aquifer, continuously replenished, or if it has been slowly collecting there for a long period of time, it will not be replaced at the rate at which we remove it. Understanding and properly managing aquifers is critical, and we owe much of our ability to do so to Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy, whose work on fluid flow revealed the physics of permeability and porosity (see filter).

Ninety-five percent of America’s freshwater is underground, and a large proportion of it—30 percent of the water used for agriculture in the United States—is contained in one of the world’s great aquifers, the Ogallala. The Ogallala, the main part of the High Plains aquifer, is formed from essentially unlithified sands, silts, and gravels that were carried off the eroding Rocky Mountains during the last twenty million years. Ancient sand dunes form parts of the aquifer, and the Nebraska Sand Hills are built on the Ogallala sediments. The reservoir is huge: it underlies an area of about 450,000 square kilometers (174,000 sq mi), covering parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. It is close to the surface, easily accessible, and 300 meters (1,000 ft) thick in parts, with an average thickness of 60 meters (200 ft).

The Ogallala contains staggering volumes of water—enough to fill Lake Huron—and supports the agricultural economy of the country. But its water is old, originally filling the reservoir during the ice ages, and it has been extracted at a rate many times faster than it is being replenished. Until the aquifer was understood and better managed toward the end of the last century, water levels had dropped on average 3 meters (10 ft) and, in some places, up to 30 meters (100 ft). We are still effectively “mining” the Ogallala water—it is a nonrenewable resource on our time scale. And the same is true of many of the world’s aquifers, including those beneath the Sahara Desert, once thought to be constantly replenished, now understood to be filled with geologically ancient water.

The quality of an aquifer depends on its porosity and permeability—how much water it can contain and how efficiently it will give it up. These characteristics depend on the nature of the sand grains, the spaces between them, and the connections between the spaces. But however porous and permeable a reservoir may be, it will never give up all its water; the same surface tension effects that help build sand castles hold water onto and between the grains and keep more water in the rock than can be extracted. This same problem applies, very significantly, to oil reservoirs.

The world’s largest accumulations of oil and gas are found in the spaces between sand grains. In Alaska, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and elsewhere, the reservoirs are made of sandstone—including carbonate oolite sandstones, which would seem to have little porosity (chapter 1). The reservoirs at the giant Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska are Permian and Triassic sandstones, deposited in shallow marine environments, deltas, and the beds of braided and meandering rivers. In the early days, it was thought that the sand grains and surface tension would allow only 40 percent of the oil in the reservoir to be extracted; technology has now increased that to almost 60 percent—but that’s still a lot of oil left underground. In reservoirs that are particularly reluctant to give up their contents, sand is often forcibly pumped via the well bore and injected into the reservoir to open up space and increase the flow. Gas in between the grains is, of course, much less reluctant to leave, but recovery is still not 100 percent. (After they are emptied, the reservoirs can be used to store or sequester gas, notably carbon dioxide.) Most tricky of all are the tar sands of the Orinoco and of Canada (brought to the attention of the Hudson’s Bay Company three hundred years ago by local tribes who used the tar to waterproof their canoes). Oil degraded by bacteria has formed the asphalt-like sticky stuff wrapped around the sand grains—and these are the largest oil accumulations in the world.

Reservoir engineering—the analysis, quantification, modeling, and prediction of the behavior of water and hydrocarbon reservoirs—is a whole science in itself, and it is critical for our way of life.

This is an excuse for a reminder, a celebration of the ways in which the word sand has contributed to our language. It appears in numerous place names—there are Sand Hills, Sand Points, Sand Creeks, Sand Lakes, Sand Banks, and Sand Rivers scattered across the map, never mind the places simply called Sand. Given that the word is the same in Danish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and (with a z) Dutch, the list is long. We can eat sand tarts in the United States, sandtortchen in Germany, zandkoekjes in the Netherlands, and sables in France. Then there are all the living creatures and plants—sand grouse, cats, fleas, dollars, eels, shrimp, sharks, pipers, wasps, pears, pines, rats, and frogs, not to mention sand bubbler crabs. And people. Sandhogs were the workers who got their name in the 1880s during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and who still excavate the subterranean network beneath New York’s streets and waterways (“if it’s deeper than a grave, the sandhogs dug it”). Sandboys, proverbially happy, used to walk the streets selling “lily white sand” for cleaning and other uses; one of them fell tragically in love with “the Ratcatcher’s Daughter,” in an old Cockney ballad of the same name. Sandgroper, the colloquial name for a native of Western Australia, refers back to participants in that region’s gold rush. We have sandbaggers in golf or poker, or any other sport; the Sandman, sometimes benign, sometimes sinister, bringing sleep and dreams; and the tirades of sandlot orators. Also in the sandlot, we have riots, constitutions, and baseball. Outside the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York (past which our sand grain journeyed in chapter 4), there is a compelling bronze statue of a boy in overalls and bare feet, hoisting a bat: “The Sand Lot Kid.” Ever since a piece of sandy land in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century was set aside for “sandlot baseball,” the term has come to embody the spirit and origins of the game to all of its aficionados.

Sand and grit serve as metaphors for strength of character, determination. Huck Finn says of Mary Jane: “In my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand.” And, speaking of determination, how many lines in the sand have been drawn through the course of history? Whether this phrase originated, as legend has it, at the Battle of the Alamo is open to debate.

To catalog the richness that sand has brought to the languages of the world is impossible. But one more example: in Malay, the word desir means the sound of sand blowing in the wind.

T is for therapy. Not only playing with sand, now a therapeutic tool for children and adults, but the benefits of being buried in it. Towering over the city of Beppu on Japan’s Kyushu Island is the volcano of Tsurumi. The volcano has not erupted in over a thousand years, but its threat remains and its heat is palpable. Beppu is famed for its boiling pools of mud, hot springs, and other geothermal manifestations—including steaming pits of hot sand. For hundreds of years, the same family has been running the Takegawara Bathhouse, where one of the main attractions is being buried in hot black volcanic sand. Like gravediggers, the Takegawara sand ladies excavate your personal pit and bury you in steaming sand, for up to twenty minutes or so. Hot sand baths, sunayu, like this can be found in many places in Japan, in venerable bathhouses or on the beach.

Hot sand therapy is not peculiar to Japan. You can pay to be buried in sand in the Sahara and on the Red Sea coast, and witch doctors bury patients in Thailand. The “best” sand is often black, which in Japan means fragments of volcanic rock, and in Egypt means sand rich in iron minerals (placer deposits). Burial is reported (by, among others, Bernie, my local London taxi driver) to be good for rheumatism and arthritis as well as skin conditions, but there is no medical evidence for the therapeutic value of volcanic or iron sand. However, some manufacturers offer modern thermal sand beds with special sand for hospital use.

The story goes that certain Pacific Islanders used to bury their women in the sand with only their noses showing when foreign ships were sighted. Today a Polynesian spa offers sand massage and a facial scrub based on powdered local sand (see abrasive).

The story of Ubar, the “Atlantis of the Sands,” is a reminder to us of how sand has preserved much of our global heritage that would otherwise have been lost. Ubar was a fabled trading city in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, home of the people of ’Ad, the descendants of Noah. According to the legend, the people of Ubar became decadent through the corruption of their fabulous wealth, and the city was destroyed in punishment and then buried in sand. In the 1980s, through a fortuitous series of events, Nicholas Clapp, a Los Angeles photographer, became fascinated by the legends and their possible basis in reality. After searching the desert by satellite and foot, Clapp and his team located what may well have been Ubar, largely buried in the sand. His book The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands, which documents his fascinating quest, has all the elements of a highly readable detective story.

Chapter 7 gave a sense of the fruitful collaboration between geology and archaeology. The examples are many, one of most recent and extraordinary being the work of a team of French and Syrian researchers at the four-thousand-year-old city of Al Rawda. On an aerial photo, the vague trace, a palimpsest, of a circular wall is visible in the sand. With geomagnetic imaging, a technique borrowed from mineral exploration that measures subtle changes in the magnetic field, a hauntingly clear image of a large city emerged, with concentric and radiating streets, buildings, and walls preserved beneath the sand.

Although the tomb of Ozymandias was described in 1799 by Napoleon’s engineers in Egypt, it was not until the nineteenth century that the glories of the ancient Egyptian temples, carvings, and statuary of Thebes were liberated from the sand. Many of the temples and the “Ramesseum” (home of the “shatter’d visage” lying on the sand in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”) were built from sandstone. The Nubian Sandstone, around eighty million years old, was quarried for much of the building material from around 2000 B.C., and its engineering properties determined the methods and architecture. The Nubian today provides one of the world’s great aquifers (see reservoir), which extends across much of northeastern Africa. Archaeologically, the Nubian Sandstone not only provided the material for Thebes but also composed the natural cliffs from which the monuments of Petra were carved and the rock within which the caves were excavated where the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden.

It is not only the dryness of the climate that preserves ancient manuscripts—the desiccating properties of sand can do the same directly. On the other side of the Sahara from Thebes, Timbuktu holds dramatic illustrations of this. From around A.D. 1300 to 1500, the fabled city was a great seat of learning, with students and scholars coming from far away to study, learn, and debate. But after its fall, many of its archives became dispersed or lost. However, in recent years, following more peaceful times in Mali, literally thousands of manuscripts have been recovered from where they had been hidden, in caves or directly in the desert sand. Many are close to six hundred years old.

V is for vines, particularly those that produce grapes from which wine can be made—a process dear to my heart. Vines, at least the kind whose grapes make great wine, thrive on well-drained soils and deprivation. The relationship between wine and geology (the idea of terroir, or the influence of soil, rock, and climate on the character of a wine) is the subject of lively debate, but the fact that vine roots reach far below the surface for nourishment is undeniable. The vines of the Bordeaux region rely on the sediments of the Garonne and the Dordogne Rivers for their character. Many vines thrive in nothing but sand. Not far from the lighthouse at Aigues-Mortes (chapter 5), in the sands carried from the crumbling Alps by the Rhône River, are les vins des sables, the sand wines. Organizations producing salt from the lagoons behind the Mediterranean coast planted vines in the sand dunes to make wine for the salt workers. After the devastating plague of phylloxera hit the vineyards of France in the late nineteenth century, it was noticed that the vines in the sand dunes were not affected: sand inhibits the lifestyle of the phylloxera-causing louse.

Vins des sables continue to be produced today, and they are very drinkable—but those in France are not alone. In the dunes on the coast of Portugal, not far from Lisbon, are the vineyards of Colares, planted in trenches to protect them from Atlantic gales. Increasingly rare because of pressure from coastal development, these vines also predate the ravages of phylloxera. So do the vines of the Kunsag region of Hungary, originally planted in the eighteenth century to stabilize sand dunes growing from the deteriorating soils of the plains of the Danube River. Similar survivors of phylloxera can be found in all of Europe’s wine regions, wherever sandy soil protected an entire vineyard or even just a few rows.

Sandy vineyards in Australia also survived the blight, and some of California’s oldest vineyards, in Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco, tell the same story. In what was once the state’s primary wine-producing area, the Contra Costa vines, today hemmed in by development, are over a hundred years old, predating the phylloxera invasions. They are planted on sand dunes that formed as sea level dropped during the last ice age and wind went to work on the exposed sediments from the eroding Sierras. The vines produce first-class Zinfandels. Sand even enhances the already rich language of wine reviewers. In a 2007 description of the ten best Zinfandels in Wine and Spirits magazine, we read that, in one, “The flavors form a rhythm, like waves on a beach, first fruit, then chocolate, then a sand bar of tannin. Give this a year or two. . . .”

Although clearly the most widely appreciated, grape vines are far from the only plants to thrive in sand. Cranberries, for example, grow in bogs—sandy bogs. In 1816, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Henry Hall started up the first commercial cultivation of cranberries. He found that the biggest and juiciest cranberries came from where sand had blown from the coastal dunes over the vines. Layers of sand in a cranberry bog are a key ingredient today, and cranberry vines can be seen simply growing in the dunes. Cashew nuts and plum trees also grow in sand, as does pearl millet, one of the world’s most resilient crops, a staple food for millions of people in semiarid regions. Mushrooms (for example, Peziza ammophila, “sand-loving”) likewise can be found in sand dunes.

Sand is heavy stuff, and its weight makes for a variety of uses. The term sandbagger originates from the use, by gangs and other criminals, of cloth or leather bags filled with sand as effective offensive weapons (known as sand clubs, sand socks, or saps).

Sand has always been used as ballast in ships, to be dumped before a cargo is picked up, complicating—or perhaps aiding—any future forensic investigation. Sand is used to weight down essentially anything: basketball hoops, patio umbrellas, turf rollers, road signs, and road barriers. You can put bags of sand in the trunk of your car to gain extra traction on slippery winter roads (which may themselves have been sanded). In the days of hanging, the British government prescribed testing of the gallows using a sandbag of the same weight as the condemned man. Indiana Jones, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, switched the booby-trapped gold idol for a bag of sand—but he severely miscalculated the weight, and the trap was sprung. The ancient Chinese are reputed to have placed small sandbags on their eyes in an attempt to improve vision.

One of the latest methods of exercise and training is the “sacked session,” which requires hauling bags of sand or pushing wheelbarrows full of sand around the gym. Or lie down, put a sandbag on your chest, and work until you are standing, holding the bag above your head. Less ambitious is working with small rubber sand balls (otherwise known as “therapy balls”) about the size of a softball, filled with sand and sold in sets of two, one for each hand.

Specialist sand-filled leather bags are used by target shooters and engravers to provide sturdy but malleable support for rifle barrels or pieces of precious metal.

X, Y, and Z

Yes, the usual combination at the awkward end of the alphabet. Fortunately, xeno-time is a mineral containing the element yttrium and is associated with zircon in placer sands (see jewelry). Yttrium is a clever element when used in metal alloys; it significantly changes their thermal properties, internal structure, and workability. Add it to glass and the latter becomes heat- and shock-resistant, useful for camera lenses, for example. It is used in lasers, in microwave filters, and as a catalyst. It is needed to stabilize synthetic cubic zirconia in fake diamonds. We have, of course, heard a fair amount about zircons (chapter 1 and above), and the long list of their uses would be a tedious way to end this chapter.

Far better, having got this far, to contemplate the calming influence of a Zen garden and cease worrying about what happens if the wicked fairy waves her wand—there wouldn’t, after all, be a lot left to worry about.