Arenophilia

means love of sand!

Russ Colson

Did you know that sand tells stories? It tells stories of the processes that formed it, the enviornment where it formed, even far away places from which that sand came, brought perhaps by rivers or wind! It's not surpirising that a geologist and a story teller would decide to collect sand!

Here is my sand collection in 2019 over 100 samples!

Why Collect Sand?

1)  Collecting sand can give you a way to focus and plan vacations, particularly if you like finding out-of-the-way places with fewer people.  One of the best adventures of my life was hiking with my young children across a grassy coastline to a tiny little cove in south Hawaii, where we scrambled down a rocky bluff to a beautiful turquoise lagoon with a green sand beach. 

2)  The sand becomes a tangible reminder of experiences in far off places and activities shared with loved ones.  I have sand from places I've been with my parents, brother, friends, wife and kids, and looking at them reminds me of hikes together, conversations, and laughter. 

3)  To a geologist, the composition of the sand, along with its particle size, sorting, and other characteristics tell a story of the environment of deposition of that sand.  Thus, the sand tells stories of crashing waves, or gentle lagoons, or volcanoes, or wind swept deserts.  I can look at the sand and remember the place where I found it all over again. 

Start your collection today!  Be sure to record where each came from (no, you won't remember in 20 years, or even 5!) and the date (some beaches change through time, sometimes naturally, sometimes due to human activities).  I always record whether the sample came from a beach face, an eolian dune, weathering residue from a pre-existing rock, or some other source.  I try to collect a representative sample, and don't usually sieve or change my samples, although some people like to clean their sand to remove bits of organic material or the finer clay and silt fraction of the sediment.  I don't usually do that because that is all part of the story of the sand.

Here are a couple of my latest collecting prizes:

1) In August of 2019 I attended the world science fiction convention in Ireland where I participated in panels on climate change, space exploration, and the interaction between faith and science. During 10 days of pre-convention excursions in Ireland, I took the opportunity to find a rare prize sand on the western side of the island, a sand composed of maerl (rhymes with twirl) a sublittoral red algae that live offshore near Galway Bay. I missed finding the sand on my first pass along the beaches near Galway, but my wife Mary and I took a whole day to try to find it again and Tah Dah! We found it!

2)  For years I ve heard about the western anthills where the ants bring up ancient shark teeth from the underlying Cretaceous sea sediments and place them as part of the sand of their hill.  How I longed to find such an anthill!

So, my wife Mary and I took a day s lark while on the way to visit my mom and brother in Utah to look for shark teeth in the anthills in the Pierre Shale of eastern Wyoming.  I sampled over 20 anthills, but, alas, found not a single shark tooth.  However, being diligent, I took the samples back to the lab and sieved them and in one of the samples I found three teeth plus two tiny ammonite shells!  Ammonites were creatures like squids that lived in shells and went extinct long ago with the dinosaurs.  Here is my sample can you find the teeth and straight, round ammonites (plus two more ammonite fragments)?

3)  I'd seen pictures online of a beautiful sand from the shores of Lake Winnibigoshish here in my own native Minnesota.  The iron districts of Minnesota provide plenty of red and pink quartz, plus the metamorphic areas provides plenty of garnet and magnetite, all making for the possibility of interesting heavy sands that can accumulate in the lag deposits along shorelines.

So, on the way back from previewing a field trip for my students, my wife Mary and I went to Lake Winnibigoshish to look for this mythical beautiful sand.  I had no idea which shore the sand had collected on, so we started with the north shore which after several hours of hiking, proved nearly inaccessible and we had to give up.  However, on the drive along the east shore, we stopped at a couple of places and, voila! we found it--red sand accumulated in lag deposits along the shore!  It just looks like plain dark sand in the sample bag, but look at it under a microscope and it knocks your socks off!  After collecting my own sample, I realized that most of the pictures online have been enhanced a bit by adjusting the saturation in Photoshop, but my picture below is just the real, stunning colors as you see them under the microscope!

Below is my earlier posting from 2012!

Here is part of my sand Collection.--Russ Colson

Here is one of my latest prizes:  Sand from the Mediterranean coast of France with abundant echinoid spines and fragments.  Echinoids are fragile and do not readily accumulate along beaches.

Here are three more of my more rare types of sand.

Green olivine sand from Hawaii (because olivine is chemically unstable in a weathering environment, it is rare in a beach, found in only a couple of places on earth)

White gypsum sand (gypsum is very soft compared to more common quartz sand, and so doesn't survive tumbling down a river to the sea).

Gray oolitic sand.  Oolites form in an environment with water enriched in CaCO₃ (often very salty) and where waves tumble particles so that the CaCO₃ coats it evenly on all sides, making tiny spheres.

These pictures are the property of Russ Colson.  If you would like to use any of them, please contact me for permission at colson@mnstate.edu.

last updated Nov 27, 2023.