Sand and Snow

Sand and Snow

    One couldn't help but watch as the snow fell the other day, the flakes piling atop one another until they began to become enough in volume to clog my snowblower.  And the weight that built up as I tried to shovel the corners and stairs...it was all wondrous, that something so tiny and light, could not only come down in the billions (enough to cumulatively cause such heft and volume), but that each could be so individual.  You've likely heard that phrase, that no two snowflakes are alike, the result of crystal formation and fractals and all sorts of other geologic and physics equations.  But it got me wondering about why, when even our massive petabyte computers are unable to create a random number past a certain point, the universe is able to do so en masse...not only snowflakes, but fingerprints, diatoms, sand particles, lip prints (which, along with retinal scans, are proving quite accurate as a means of validating identifications).  Sometime long ago I became amazed that the White Cliffs of Dover were built up over millions of years, all by small calcified coccoliths adding to the chalky sediment a millimeter at a time, each coccolith a bit different than the other.  Individuals.  Even more impressive, you've likely heard that scientists now believe that there are more galaxies in our universe (and some believe that our universe is but one of many) than there are grains of sand on our earth (mind you, not small solar systems such as ours [although it would still take us 9 months to travel from our planet to Mars, then 9 months back], but galaxies of which our solar system rests in a tiny corner of this medium-sized galaxy we call the Milky Way).

    Individuals all.  And I had mentioned sand in the last post, the sands of Wisconsin (really?), something highly in demand with the fracking industry, the state's sand grains particularly round and polished, more so than other sands, and thus perfect for fluidity and its ability to penetrate tiny cracks and fissures (those same qualities make Wisconsin's sand terrible for construction uses).  But sand, as common as we think it is, is dwindling.  Demand is exponentially rising as countries add to their shores and deplete rivers and beaches to do so.  And if there's money to be made, well, there might just be some illegal activity, including deaths, as told in a story in Wired not long ago: Though the supply might seem endless, sand is a finite resource like any other.  The worldwide construction boom of recent years -all those mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to Beijing- is devouring  unprecedented quantities; extracting it is a $70 billion industry.  In Dubai enormous land-reclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper-building have exhausted all the nearby sources.  Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs...In some places multinational companies dredge it up with massive machines; in others local people haul it away with shovels and pickup trucks.  As land quarries and riverbeds become tapped out, sand miners are turning to the seas, where thousands of ships now vacuum up huge amounts of the stuff from the ocean floor...Sand mining has erased at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005.  The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea.  The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer.  The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all restricted or banned exports of sand to Singapore...All of that has spawned a worldwide boom in illegal sand mining. 

    Travel the world and you can find sand of all colors, from purple to pink, and from orange to black.  And that is just the sand we can see.  In the South China Sea, China is aggressively dredging sand up from the ocean's depths to build new islands entirely.  Says The Week: China has built and deployed gigantic dredgers the size of skyscrapers that can move more than 4,000 cubic meters of sand and rock every hour.  The vessels are dredging out deepwater harbors suitable for large ships and dumping massive amounts of sand onto reefs to build islands big enough for military bases.  More than 2,000 acres of new land have been formed, mostly in the past six months.  China "is not wasting any time trying to get these islands created, infrastructure built, and populated," said James Hardy of Jane's Defence Weekly.  One of the seven new islands is almost two miles long and sports a nearly completed airstrip suitable for fighter jets.

    Ironically, sand is proving as mysterious as snow.  In parts of China, sand is making a steady march into cities and burying outer ends of the Great Wall (much of which has eroded; catch an excellent book to view the changes, The Great Wall Revisited); and in Wisconsin's Mt. Baldy, sand is capturing people in apparent sinkholes, enough to close the park says Smithsonian: People have turned a scientific eye on minerals since at least the fourth century B.C., when Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, wrote his treatise “On Stones.”  But because deserts are inhospitable and sand has scant commercial value, the subdiscipline of dunes had to wait until the 20th century to find a champion.  Ralph Bagnold, a Cambridge-educated engineer in the British Army, explored the Sinai and Sahara on leave before drafting his 1941 masterwork The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, which is still routinely cited in scientific journals...Today a great deal is known about dunes: how wind launches individual grains of sand and piles them into parabolas, ridges and other distinctive shapes; how plants steady dunes, and how waves weather them; how a dune’s history and age can be deduced from certain properties of buried sand and soil.  Riddles remain (the movement of small particles is a complicated, chaotic business), but one thing about dunes has never been in doubt: their solidity...Combining painstaking physical measurements with an analysis of aerial photographs, Zoran Kilibarda, a colleague of Argyilan’s at IU Northwest, discovered that the dune had rolled nearly 440 feet inland between 1938 and 2007.  It had buried trails and a staircase, and stands of black oak, 60- to 80-feet tall, that had long stood between Baldy’s bottom edge and the parking lot. In March 2007, as the first of Kilibarda’s figures came in, stunned park officials called Baldy’s pace “alarming,” warning that it could bury its own parking lot within seven years.  They banned the public from its steep inland side, or slipface; footfalls were thought to be accelerating its advance.  But Baldy refused to be tamed.  A friend of mine now taking an advanced avalanche rescue told me of how snow gathers around different areas (less so around the roots of trees, making those areas less solid) and how one has to test the granules or viscosity before venturing into backcountry areas (part of this is also survival skills, such as building an ice tunnel with a lower "vent" below your sleeping area to exhaust the carbon dioxide).

   As with soil erosion, however, we have much to learn about sand and its part in our ecosystem (as mentioned earlier, the NOVA special showed how essential minerals from sand in the Middle East are blown across the Atlantic ocean in a pattern that "feeds" the Amazon jungle); with soil, one-third has been lost to erosion in the last 50 years, a rate that contiunes 20 times faster than the rate that soil can be created.  That equates to 75 billion tons of soil, says National Geographic: "The Romans still plowed themselves out of business, as did the Greeks, and Easter Islanders," says David Montgomery, who studies topography at the University of Washington in Seattle and is the author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations...Soil, like oil, is a finite resource...By 1991, an area bigger than the United States and Canada combined was lost to soil erosion—and it shows no signs of stopping. 

    Author Amanda Fortini wrote an essay in The Week about her move to Montana, to a place still with coffee shops and movie theaters, but remote enough where:...nature is forceful, astronomical in its magnitude and scale, powerful in its ability to dictate your daily life.  And that's not only during winter.  There are dust storms here that brown out the sky, winds that pinball through valleys at hurricane speeds, and golf ball–sized hail that descends without warning to pockmark the roofs of houses and cars.  But after a few years, as with the moving sands, she begins to yield to her surroundings: Over time, living in Montana has pounded into my consciousness the notion that no matter how much we fight it, whether with technology, our wills, or sheer denial, we are natural beings subject to forces greater than ourselves.  Sometimes the natural world takes your power, as it does deep in February, when every fiber of your being wants to hibernate.  Sometimes it bestows you with power you never imagined you could possess, as it does during the peak of summer, when you don't need much sleep, and you feel like you're riding along with all of the motions of the universe.  Sometimes it terrifies you with its awesome brutality...Just as there are receptors in the brain for drugs, I like to think we have receptors for nature as well.  We may believe we are run by our thoughts and anxieties, our urges and our choices, but come to a place like Montana and you will be reminded that the moon is running you.  The sun is running you.  The light or lack of light is running you.  You are the full moon.  You are the rushing river.  You are the animal, moving and being moved.

    Curling one's toes in the sand, or wondering how there could possibly be that many galaxies in our universe, we are faced with thoughts both imagined and unimaginable.  And indeed, sand and wind and air would all seem infinite during those moments.  But each of those quartz and calcified grains took eons to develop, and now we're encasing them and locking them up as if prisoners of our will, sealing ourselves inside their concrete walls and blocking those grains that are still freely blowing outside.  And possibly, it will all end, and we will wonder what we have done.  Sand has buried the pyramids and forests and entire civilizations...perhaps it is time we listened to time, and perhaps to the sands.