Sand and the beach
A grain of sand. It can be a terrible irritant if it is stuck in the wrong place. It can ruin a fine piece of machinery or electronics. It can also be the catalyst for a beautiful pearl. And of course, put a few billion of them together and you end up with one gorgeous beach.
Sand is something that we in the Bahamas take for granted. Go to the water’s edge and most of the time you’ll find sand. We make sand castles and enjoy the smoothness under our feet both on land and in the water. We wouldn’t have the beaches without the sand!
Spending some time at the beach recently we picked up a handful of sand and watched it pass through our fingers and back to its rightful place. We grabbed another small amount and spread it in our palm, trying to count the grains. We then began to wonder, as we often have, how many grains of sand were on this particular long stretch of beach? One billion? Six hundred trillion? Four-hundred-and-seventy-three quadrillion? What do you do when you have these kinds of questions? Visit Google as soon as you get home!
A few seconds after formulating a logical sequence of search terms we came across an interesting postulation. Often, people make comparisons between the number of stars in the universe with the grains of sand on Earth (as is done in the Bible). Some very intelligent people came up with a few ideas that help quantify both numbers. While the formulae are pretty intense, the end result is that there are about 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion, grains of sand. That’s a LOT! How does that compare with the of stars in the universe? Let’s just say, they are relatively close–that is, IF the calculations are correct.
But the grains of sand in the Bahamas may soon be getting a bit easier to calculate. Recent news reports have stated that the Bahamas government is in negotiations with Florida counties to sell our sand to help restore beaches in South Florida that have severely eroded over the past decade. We’d rather have more sand to count here than end up having to look elsewhere to restore our own beaches a decade from now.
~ejr~