Puzzle, where does beach sand come from?

Ok, it sounds like a daft question, and probably is really. Where does beach sand come from? Obviously it's just bedrock that's been pulverised by tides and currents for millenia.

But, here's the bit that puzzles me. Here in Redcar, we are in a wide bay (about 7 miles of beach in all). North easterly winds are not unusual, and when the wind gets up, sand is carried from the beach onto the roads, into people's gardens, everywhere. In a day, hundreds of tonnes of the stuff can end up in great drifts on the roads, and that's not to mention the amount that just disperses over everything.

Then I got to thinking, as nobody actually puts it back (which would be a pretty impossible and futile task), how come it never runs out?

Before you all think I've finally cracked completely, there is logic behind my questioning. See, we have an expanse of dunes along our bit of the coast. The dunes are made of nothing more than drifted beach sand, yet they are now covered in lovely grass and so many different wildflowers it's more diverse than anything we could make, so I've toyed with the idea of pinching a few bags of sand from an as yet uncolonised patch of dunes but then I thought if I do that, then would I be upsetting some delicate balance? That's when I thought, there is no way I can carry in a year even a fraction of what goes onto the roads in one day of gales. So that got me to thinking, how exactly does it get replenished indefinitely at a rate roughly equal to the loss through drift?

 

I reckon there's a philosophical answer to this...

 

1st law of life..........everything has to be somewhere. So beaches thought the seaside is a great place to be

 

Take a Wheelbarrow, Broom and Shovel to Redcar Beach Roads after a storm and clean the streets. Ola a barrowload of sand - not nicked from the beach, and a bit of Civic Pride re-installed.
Clueless, you'll be a local hero - and have the sand you need.

 

Anyone remember them test tubes with the different coloured sand in with a cork at the bottom!

 

You beat me to the coloured sand answer John I have been to Alum bay , it is an incredible place. There is also a little wireless shack there used by Marconi for his wireless experiments in the late 1800's . He used a 300 foot ariel and just managed to contact Bournemouth ! We have come a hell of a long way in just over 100 years .

 

Did you actually meet Marconi while you were there shiney ?

 

Sand gets washed along the coast by a process known as Longshore drift. Not sure what direction it goes up your way Dave but on the South Coast its from West to East.

If they put up an unnatural barrier then it builds up on the West side & gets eroded from the East.

I've got a pic of West Bay in Victorian times not long after the 2 Harbour arms were built & there was a lot of beach on the East side.

Just before they re built it about 10 years ago, the beach had gone to the extent that you could fish off the East side. They've now replaced the sand with thousands of tonnes of imported sand, but even that is starting to receed already.

They put the wrong shingle on the West side, so when you visit the "Jurassic" coast, you are sitting on red Devonian shingle

 

I'm still pondering it.

Lets say I want a total of 250kg of sand.

On one hand, if I liberate it from our local beach just between the tide line and the foot of the dunes, it is as local as it gets. About 1 mile from source to destination. No quarrying, no great wagons, no JCBs, no hundreds (or thousands) of miles on the road.

On the other hand, I'm not clever enough to understand the potential impact of taking from a natural process, plus if I did it and everyone else did it, then it wouldn't be long before a very visible and long term difference was made. In any case sand is cheap enough to buy and have delivered (about £40 per tonne I think) so that's the much easier option, as opposed to bagging it up, then manually hauling several hundred yards from beach to car.

I've decided I'm not going to pinch it from the beach, because like I say its easier to just order it in and let someone else figure out how to get it to my house, but pushing law, cost, and effort to one side, I wonder which would be the most eco-friendly option.

 

Buying it in would ultimately be the eco friendly option
You as but one, will make no difference using the delivery that hundreds have already used, so one more delivery emission is like a gnat on an Elephants back

IF you went and pinched the sand,it would make a minute - difference to the beach and would make one minute + difference to delivery as you would also have to transport it home (using a car not a wheel barrow)
Though if you had to use your car more often to earn the monies to pay for the sand and delivery then it would be more eco friendly to pinch it

You need to pinch it then

Jack McH