Why is All Sand the Same?
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Sand, whether you use it for building sand castles, telling time with an hourglass, orhydraulic fracturing, is pretty much the same just about anywhere you go -- an uncountablenumber of tiny grains mixed together to form the same dunes and beaches.But why does sand almost always look the same? And how does so much of it end up at the beach?Well, much of the world's sand is made out of the same stuff-- tiny crystals of the mineralquartz, which is made out of silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements in Earth's crust.And as you'll know if you've ever bitten through the crust -- of a sandwich -- that had sandin it -- quartz grains are small, and really tough. Here's why:Quartz crystals form within a cooling blob of molten granite...
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Sand, whether you use it for building sand castles, telling time with an hourglass, orhydraulic fracturing, is pretty much the same just about anywhere you go -- an uncountablenumber of tiny grains mixed together to form the same dunes and beaches.But why does sand almost always look the same? And how does so much of it end up at the beach?Well, much of the world's sand is made out of the same stuff-- tiny crystals of the mineralquartz, which is made out of silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements in Earth's crust.And as you'll know if you've ever bitten through the crust -- of a sandwich -- that had sandin it -- quartz grains are small, and really tough. Here's why:Quartz crystals form within a cooling blob of molten granite...
