Whitehaven Beach, Whitsunday Island, Australia
Whitehaven Beach is consistently ranked as the world's best beach, and with good reason: It's almost surreally beautiful. Besides its crystal clear waters, it's known for its white sand, consisting of 98% pure silica which gives it a bright white color.
Whitehaven Beach, Australia
Made of extremely fine, silica-rich quartz, the squeaky-soft sand is some of the smoothest and whitest in the world.
Most white sandy beaches are derived from granitic, or less commonly sandstone, geologies that weather to produce fine, frosted quartz sand grains. Interestingly, sands made from shell or coral fragments just aren't as white.
The Hyams Beach is a beautiful Jervis Bay beach, located in New South Wales, Australia. According to the Guinness World Record, it boasts the whitest sand on our entire planet. The Hyams Beach sand it made up of microscopic quartz particles – tiny sand crystals that are almost fluorescent.
Geologist theorise that the sand drifted to the island from elsewhere, millions of years ago, eventually becoming trapped by the rocks and headlands of the area. Over time, and ice ages, fresh water leached the impurities from the land, leaving only the pure, fine white sand we see today.
Lucky Bay, Cape Le Grand National Park
Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grand National Park is home to some of the whitest sand in all of Australia.
Kiama's Black Beach gets its name (and colour) from the black basalt sand and cobbles that line its shore. Although less popular with swimmers than with snorkelers, the ocean pools on either side of…
This occurs in rocks that contain high amounts of iron. In this type of environment, these rocks actually begin to rust. As the rust expands, it weakens the rock and helps break it apart. The oxides produced through this process give the ground its reddish hue.
'Big Red' is the name given to a particular sand dune that marks the symbolic edge of the Simpson Desert.
Kamilo Beach, located on the south-eastern tip of Hawaii's Big Island, has been dubbed one of the most plastic-polluted spots on the planet.
The Weddell Sea, Antarctic Peninsula
The Weddell Sea has been claimed by scientists to have the clearest waters of any ocean in the world.
On July 12, 1896, Revere Beach was opened as the first public beach in the nation. An estimated 45,000 people showed up on opening day.
Green sand is the rarest color of sand in the entire world. It's caused by a special type of volcanic eruption in which olivine crystals (which are green) are brought to the surface of the earth.
First of all, clean sand, as described by soil scientists through a sieve analysis, is a soil texture composed by weight of at least 25 percent very coarse, coarse and medium sand varying in size from 2.0 to 0.25 mm (millimeters), less than 50 percent of fine or very fine sand ranging in size between 0.25 and 0.05 mm, ...
No. 1 Sand is a river sand suitable for a range of uses including concretes, mortars, grouts, plasters and paint. In general it has a top particle size of 2.36mm and a bottom particle size of 0.75um with an average size of 0.45mm.
Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the entire world. Around 18% of the Australian mainland is desert. Most of Australia's deserts are located in the Western Plateau and the Interior Lowlands. Annual monsoon seasons cause huge amounts of water to fall on Australia's deserts.
Lake Eyre. The most arid and dry parts of Australia centre around the Lake Eyre basin, which can range from an average rainfall of 100mm to 140mm per year.
Australian desert facts. Seventy per cent of the Australian mainland is classified as semi-arid, arid or desert; making it the driest inhabited continent on earth. Only Antarctica is drier.
In general, it is not legal to take sand from the beach in Australia. The reason behind this is that sand plays a crucial role in the coastal ecosystem, providing habitat and shelter for a variety of marine and terrestrial species.
Trade Balance
In 2021, Australia imported $3.14M in Sand, mainly from China ($1.72M), United States ($423k), Greece ($411k), Germany ($146k), and Japan ($119k).
Australia exported Sands; natural, silica and quartz sands, whether or not coloured to Unspecified ($88,364.35K , 3,952,690,000 Kg), Germany ($1,762.02K , 425,400 Kg), United States ($1,611.64K , 13,897,300 Kg), New Zealand ($1,290.64K , 49,861,700 Kg), Philippines ($861.41K , 42,005,000 Kg).
The Wet Tropics of Queensland, or Wet Tropics, stretches along the northeast coast of Australia for some 450 kilometres. Encompassing some 894,420 hectares of mostly tropical rainforest, this stunningly beautiful area is extremely important for its rich and unique biodiversity.
Most white sandy beaches are derived from granitic, or less commonly sandstone, geologies that weather to produce fine, frosted quartz sand grains.