Sand

The Never-Ending Story

Michael Welland

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520942004
• Print ISBN:
  9780520265974
• Edition: 1

From individual grains to desert dunes, from the bottom of the sea to the landscapes of Mars, and from billions of years in the past to the future, this is the extraordinary story of one of nature's humblest, most powerful, and most ubiquitous materials. Told by a geologist with a novelist's sense of language and narrative, Sand examines the science—sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration—and at the same time explores the rich human context of sand. Interwoven with tales of artists, mathematicians, explorers, and even a vampire, the story of sand is an epic of environmental construction and destruction, an adventure in staggering scales of time and distance, yet a tale that encompasses the ordinary and everyday. Sand, in fact, is all around us—it has made possible our computers, buildings and windows, toothpaste, cosmetics, and paper, and it has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce, and imagination. In this luminous, kinetic, revelatory account, we do indeed find the world in a grain of sand.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Color plates
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Individuals: Birth and Character
• 2 Tribes: The Strange World of Granular Materials
• 3 Sand and Imagination I: Very Large Numbers of Very Small Things
• 4 Societies on the Move: A Journey to the Sea
• 5 Moving On: Waves, Tides, and Storms
• 6 Blowing in the Wind: Desert Landscapes
• 7 Witness: Testaments of Sand
• 8 Sand and Imagination II: Stories, Medium, and Muse
• 9 Servant: Sand in Our Lives
• 10 Outward and Onward: Beyond Earth, beyond the Present
• Epilogue: A Desert Mystery
• Sources and Further Reading
• Index