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The World Is Running Out of Sand

214 points| laktak | 8 years ago |smithsonianmag.com | reply

134 comments

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[+] beat|8 years ago|reply
I've had a weird front row seat to sand in Minnesota. We have a popular local renaissance festival southwest of the Twin Cities. Its location is typical for such things - a plot of otherwise unused land near a riverbed, too sandy for typical Minnesota farming, thanks to the meanderings of the nearby Minnesota River.

The sandy soil, it turns out, is like a hundred feet deep, and perfect for fracking operations in the kinda-nearby North Dakota gas fields. A few years back, the owners started aggressively strip-mining it, leaving gaping holes where the festival parking lots once were. Eventually, they ended the lease with the festival, in order to strip-mine the land it sits on.

Imagine that... mere "sand", so valuable that it's worth giving up a substantial commercial lease that has run for decades and should have been able to run for decades into the future (and provides hundreds of local jobs), just for the one-time use.

[+] cal5k|8 years ago|reply
It makes sense if you think about it... let’s say that sand sells for $10 per cubic yard. If there’s a substantial area with sand down to 100ft you’re talking millions upon millions of dollars worth of sand!
[+] linkregister|8 years ago|reply
This is interesting to me because the Renaissance festival that has come to my home town for decades has been staffed exclusively by Minnesota natives. It's probably the same festival. I wonder if this decision cost the entire Midwest and Northeast their opportunity to have a Ren Fest.
[+] module0000|8 years ago|reply
tldr; greed trumps all else. Very sad but unsurprising to read your story :(
[+] thaumaturgy|8 years ago|reply
I learned about the importance of sand (and other media) this year when setting up a saltwater tank for my s.o.; I really had no idea beforehand.

Sand provides a huge amount of surface area for colonies of bacteria responsible for converting ammonia into nitrites and nitrites into nitrates, which can then be taken up by plants or algae and converted into other chemicals that are less harmful to aquatic species.

Dredging sand from rivers and beaches is likely going to be seen as a massive ecological disaster in the next couple of decades.

[+] encoderer|8 years ago|reply
Only somewhat related, I recently was in Malibu and needing to relieve myself my wife and I stopped into an open house for a beachfront home. Nice house, private beach access. Anyway, the agent tells me that just down the road the residents there lost their private beach. Work was done to a harbor a couple miles north and it changed the tidal dynamics and in just a couple of days all the sand was washed away.

I had never heard of that before. Hard to feel too bad about people losing their private beach but interesting nevertheless.

The house had nice facilities, 10/10 would use again.

[+] smogcutter|8 years ago|reply
Side note about Malibu: those beaches aren't private, but homeowners illegally block access. (with cooperation from the sherriff's dept, who know where their bread is buttered)
[+] russdill|8 years ago|reply
Reminds me of magic sands beach in Kona. It looked like an awesome beach in pictures so we went. There was no sand. It was all gone. Had to check 3 or 4 times that we actually had the right beach. Turns out seasonal hydrology removes the sand in the winter, but puts it all back in the summer.
[+] uniformlyrandom|8 years ago|reply
This happens all the time, due to the natural causes. In Hawaii, some beaches are seasonal. It is funny to read the mixed reviews of nearby properties on AirBnb - some people praise the beach, and some people cannot find it.
[+] mdemare|8 years ago|reply
According to Google autocomplete, the world is also running out of antivenom, bees, cocoa, doctors, energy, fish, gravity, helium, ip addresses, jobs, lithium, magnets, nutella, oil, phosphorus, rice, scotch, topsoil, vanilla and water.
[+] Animats|8 years ago|reply
The developed world is not running out of sand. It's making sand by crushing rock. Here's a typical sand-making plant in China, with old, beat-up equipment making sand in high quantity.[1] There are lots of sand-making machine videos on Youtube, some from China, some from India, and some from the US. They all work about the same; first there's a rock-crusher, then some screening, then a cone crusher which crushes gravel against gravel until it's sand, then a washing and screening stage. All the plants look similar - lots of conveyors and trucks, few people. It's not even that energy intensive. Look at the motor sizes on the equipment. The trucks are probably using more energy than the crushers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07WTDgO-K-k

[+] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
The article also mentions a shortage of gravel. I'd certainly be surprised if there were a shortage of both sand and gravel but rock were in abundance.
[+] Hextinium|8 years ago|reply
I would venture a guess to say that we can always make sand but it is easier to just dig it out of the ground instead of crushing it all up.
[+] imtringued|8 years ago|reply
From a certain perspective the entire perspective is a very big sand crusher. The humans are picking up the surplus.
[+] kilroy123|8 years ago|reply
I thought it was crushed _coral_, not rock?
[+] deskamess|8 years ago|reply
This is a big problem in India too. Many of the rivers in Kerala state have been impacted by illegal sand mining. We had rarely used property next to the river which we sold to a relative who had a house next to ours. They fell on hard times and sold it to someone else who discovered the sand and started mining the land ($$$$). That land, the house, the large jackfruit and coffee trees are no more; in its place is a huge indentation in the landscape where the river would fill if there was enough water. The rest of the river has very little sand in it as a result of mining. Natural flooding is now very rare. It has been reduced to a sliver of its former self.
[+] program_whiz|8 years ago|reply
Interesting comment on article: Isn't this better stated as "some areas of the world are running out of sand"? The Sahara is 9.2E12 meters squared and one estimate puts the average depth of sand at 150m, giving 1.38E15 m^3 of sand. The earth's land area is 5.1E14 m^2, meaning the sand in the Sahara alone is enough to cover earth's land area in 2.7m (9ft) of sand
[+] ehllo|8 years ago|reply
Sand =! Industrial usable Sand. Not all kind of "Sand" is suited for the industry(today). Most desert/dune sand is to fine grained and has a smooth surface, so that it is unusable to create strong material. There are some projects/studies already that use "desert sand + X" to create "strong" material.

http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-material-flows-a...

https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mini...

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/amse/2016/2158706/

http://maxwellsci.com/print/rjees/v4-1071-1078.pdf

[+] beat|8 years ago|reply
Sand is not just sand. It's not a fungible thing. Different kinds of sand have different mineral compositions, different sizes and shapes for the grains, different consistencies, etc. The sand used to make an iPhone screen is different from the sand used to peel paint, but both are highly specific.

It's not just sand that's running out. It's specific kinds of sand, or sand that is readily available (because sand is expensive and annoying to transport).

[+] 0x4f3759df|8 years ago|reply
Sahara sand is not suitable for construction or island building because it is too spherical, desirable sand is jagged because it clumps together better.
[+] toblender|8 years ago|reply
What's stopping us from making new sand with a giant solar powered grinder?

We should have plenty of rocks...

[+] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
"Running out of" should, as always, come with the qualifier "at a reasonable price". Rock-crushing is quite energy intensive compared to just dredging.

Generally in the West you'll find substitutes like crushed concrete or pulverised fly ash being added to the mix (although PFA itself will be in short supply as it's a coal-fired power station by product)

[+] ska|8 years ago|reply
"running out of sand" parallels "running out of oil". It's not that there isn't any left, it's just not cost effective.
[+] rm_-rf_slash|8 years ago|reply
There are different kinds of sands, and the better kinds are more desired and presumably more expensive to manufacture.

Sarasota has sand that feels like a fine powder. It’s wonderful, and also quite limited. In fact there was a recent expensive reconstruction of a beach that was blown away quite quickly because the city didn’t believe the engineers saying it needed more support. Millions of dollars of prime sand lost.

Cape Cod has sand that feels like rocks (and the water is ALWAYS cold, even in July!). Nobody would buy that.

[+] peeters|8 years ago|reply
I'm not sure why they didn't get the Yangtze juxtaposition to line up, but you can put this in the Chrome debugger to get a lined-up juxtaposition:

    $('.jx-left > img').style = 'margin-left: 5px'
[+] PeachPlum|8 years ago|reply
Homilies that didn't age well :

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." - Milton Friedman

[+] tankenmate|8 years ago|reply
The world is running out of cheap sand. Time to breed swarms of parrotfish?
[+] werdnapk|8 years ago|reply
You need a healthy coral reef to do that and us humans have done a pretty good job at running out of those too.
[+] haberman|8 years ago|reply
I worry about this sometimes with all sorts of raw materials and waste products. We seem to take for granted that we can make as many cars, computers, buildings, etc. as the market demands. But there must be some kind of eventual limit to how much steel, rubber, plastic, glass, etc. we can manufacture before we've used it all up. It fills me with vague anxiety that I don't have any sense for how many of these raw materials are left. And I also wonder whose job it is to think about such things, and if they are thinking ahead or just building for the now.
[+] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
Why aren't the companies required to replace the sand with Sahara desert sand, say? They are capable of transporting sand so it would seem straightforward.