The Universe Truly IS in a Grain of Sand

          You may have noticed I've been a bit sand-obsessed since my trip to Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado in October. Discovering these individual sand grain images magnified 250 times has blown in a fresh look at sand. The sea urchin spines in the right part of the image are particularly striking in this calcium carbonate-rich sand:

      The three-pronged sponge spicule in this image from a Maui beach is but one sand grain; "sand" is defined as a size of sedimentary particle ranging from 1/16 to 2 mm, rather than composition (I.e., quartz).

     Sand grains may also be glacially deposited as these grains of garnet, agate, epidote, quartz, magnetite, and hematite, in Lake Winnibigoshish, WI.

      Sand grains of gypsum from the White Sands area in New Mexico, are some of the most uniform in color, though they are quite soft (hardness of 2 on Moh's Hardness Scale):

      And the hydraulic fracturing sands in western and southern Wisconsin are quite uniform, hard (hardness of 7 on Moh's Hardness Scale) quartz grains:

      "Puffy stars," calcium carbonate forams on Okinawa beaches are quite uniform in size and have a distinctive shape:

     Note the rounded, smooth shells, foraminifera, piece of coral, and the volcanic fragment (in the lower right.)

     Check out these colorful, luminescent, rounded bits of foraminifera, shells, and quartz in this sand mix.

And, to tie things back to where we started this week, here are rounded, smoothed, sea urchin sand fragments from Hawai'ian sand; these are essentially cross sections of the long, green spines seen in the first image.

Take this all with a grain of calcium car- bonate or quartz or gypsum salt or. . .

Steph

There are GLOSTA lovers in Colorado!

Playa-ble: An Unexpected Trip to Black Rock Desert and Burning Man

          An unexpected trip to the ending of the Burning Man festival, held on a gigantic gray/white playa called Black Rock Playa near Reno, Nevada

 resulted in a late Partial Ellipsis Of The Sun... but also in these wonderful images of the playa and the journey there. [Take the Fernley exit off I-80 in far northwestern Nevada and head north on a one-lane-each-way road.]

          The playa varies in elevation only .02 inches across the up to 12-mile wide, 40-mile long, desert feature:

     Being "on playa" is quite an experience. . .Keep your white/limestone-colored dogs close at all times out on the evaporative gypsum and selenite salts:

      Salt Lake and environs:

View from the Salt Palace:

      People at Burning Man are quite flexible; one might even say they are playa-ble.

    These words from John Mcphee's Basin and Range say it all:

     "This Nevada terrain is not corrugated, like the folded Appalachians, like a tubal air mattress, like a rippled potato chip.

       This is not--in that compressive manner--a ridge and valley situation.

        Each range here is like a WARSHIP standing on its own, and the Great Basin is an ocean of loose sediment with these mountain ranges standing in it as if they were members of a fleet without precedent, assembled at Guam to assault Guam. . .

     Animals tend to be content with their home ranges and not to venture out across the big dry valleys.The fauna in the high ranges are quite distinct from one another. Animals are isolated like Darwin's finches in the Galapagoes.

     THESE RANGES ARE TRULY ISLANDS."

     Ahh, such extensive, pulling apart, stretching, expansive writing, Mr. McPhee! 

       Those last words in capital letters resonated with me while at Burning Man. We were at this old, old beach, in a now-waterless expanse of alkaline salts, trying to find a way to "swim" to shore and out of isolation. . .

     Until next week and the fossil limestone "forests" near Kunming City, China, and in Denver, Colorado.

     Play-a-long, would you please?

     Here are three more images from the journey:

        Best night's sleep on this little cot on the playa!

Steph

Word Woman

Some of the art at Burning Man:

     

     And my art installation upon returning to Colorado: