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John R. Gillis writes in the NYT that to those of us who visit beaches only in summer, beaches seem as permanent a part of our natural heritage as the Rocky Mountains but shore dwellers know that beaches are the most transitory of landscapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of all. Today, 75 to 90 percent of the world’s natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of shores. The extent of this global crisis is obscured because so-called beach nourishment projects attempt to hold sand in place(PDF) and repair the damage by the time summer people return, creating the illusion of an eternal shore. But the market for mined sand in the US has become a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10 percent a year since 2008. Interior mining operations use huge machines working in open pits to dig down under the earth’s surface to get sand left behind by ancient glaciers.
One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother; they don’t adhere to rougher sand grains, and tend to blow away. As a result, the desert state of Saudi Arabia brings sand for sandblasting all the way from Australia. Huge sand mining operations are emerging worldwide, many of them illegal, happening out of sight and out of mind, as far as the developed world is concerned. "We need to stop taking sand for granted and think of it as an endangered natural resource," concludes Gillis. "Beach replenishment — the mining and trucking and dredging of sand to meet tourist expectations — must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with environmental considerations taking top priority. Only this will ensure that the story of the earth will still have subsequent chapters told in grains of sand."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday November 07 2014, @03:34PM
Fascinating: On the other site, I posted a reply, but it has totally and utterly disappeared. I figured it might get marked "troll", but it actually seems to have been deleted entirely. Yet another reason to stick with Soylent.
Anyhow, the informative bit: The biggest usage of sand is for making concrete [coastalcare.org], where you want sharp sand. Incredible masses of concrete (billions of tons) are poured every year, and the sand for that concrete is dredged from the ocean floor. This affects sandy beaches, because the sand that might refresh them in major storms is missing.
The trollish bit: The references to rising sea level are just stupid. If rising sea level destroyed beaches, there would be none left - sea level has risen more than 100 meters since the last ice age. What rising sea level does is change beaches. Sea level is rising at the rate of 0mm to 3mm per year [noaa.gov], and has been doing so for millenia [wikipedia.org]. No one promised us an unchanging earth, and people with seaside property are fools to think otherwise.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by fishybell on Friday November 07 2014, @05:02PM
Thank you for being a beacon of reason.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Squidious on Friday November 07 2014, @05:07PM
The entire ocean floor is covered with sediment of various types, but it is generally the same stuff that is pushed up by nature (or man) to form beaches. And some of it is renewable, i.e. discarded shells from dead creatures that get ground up in the surf over time. This article smells of ignorance or BS, I can't tell which. The only "danger" I see is having to spend more money to pump the sand from farther out in some instances to keep your pristine white beaches or to use for industry. And if some of that sand has more biologic content then we might have to put of with some smell for a while until the sun bakes it out. If and when the oceans rise they will chew up and wash away any man made structures, just wait and you will get your lovely white beach back eventually.
The terrorists have won, game, set, match. They've scared the people into electing authoritarian regimes.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday November 07 2014, @06:07PM
If and when the oceans rise they will chew up and wash away any man made structures
And unfathomable ancient horrors shall surface and reclaim this world from the puny, mewling monkeys that laughingly claim dominion over it, and with them shall come their terrible Gods, ancient and inscrutable monsters of decay and madness and terror, and those lamentable few who are not drowned or burned or sacrificed shall be driven mad and beg for death to release them from the insufferable agonies of their pitiless new overlords, and the endless reign of insanity shall begin.
But at least we'll still have sand.
(Score: 1) by Squidious on Friday November 07 2014, @07:03PM
Beautiful! And hopefully I will have my Sun Sword constructed by then :-) http://youtu.be/LhAobPugvsk [youtu.be]
The terrorists have won, game, set, match. They've scared the people into electing authoritarian regimes.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday November 08 2014, @12:06AM
I wanted to know if this was a Lovecraft quote or just a good parody, so I (Google) searched
"And unfathomable ancient horrors shall surface and reclaim this world from the puny"
...and the top result was NOT a quoted string match, it was matched based on word-usage statistics!
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft [wikiquote.org]
I mod your comment +1 "lovingly crafted".
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday November 07 2014, @06:30PM
In line with the principle that you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately be explained by stupidity, I'd say your comment probably just got lost due to a bug in Slashdot's current code. Especially if the content was the same as the content here, I really don't see why they should delete it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday November 07 2014, @07:04PM
You're likely right - I have no reason to suppose it was malice...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday November 08 2014, @02:22AM
How does it compare to the amount of sand used for making glass?
As to sources, across the U.S. west of the Mississippi, I've never seen sand come from anywhere but local gravel pits. It just doesn't have enough value to truck mass quantities all over hell, especially since it's so heavy it needs extra-duty equipment that sucks fuel at gallons-per-mile rates.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.