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It has come to my attention that there are a couple places in the world claiming to have sand that is whiter than our beaches here on the Emerald Coast.  I take issue with that, and would like to settle the matter.  Since I’ve only had 350 readers of my blog so far, and as far as I can tell not one of those readers lives anywhere near the offending beaches, we’ll just talk about them behind their backs until they catch on and decide to argue with us.

First I’ll define some terms for my many readers in Michigan, a state where beach sand comes in the form of large, round, fossil-pocked rocks called Petoskey stones.  The Emerald Coast is a stretch of Gulf of Mexico coast in the Florida panhandle.  It’s roughly the strip of beachfront property between Panama City on the east and Pensacola on the west.  This is where THE WHITEST SAND IN THE WORLD has accumulated over countless eons and is now lying pristine in the hot Florida sun, tempting people to take off most of their clothes and absorb UV radiation. The beaches of the Emerald Coast appear white from a distance but are actually composed of polished quartz crystals that are transparent when observed under magnification.

The other term I would like to define is “Redneck Riviera.”  This is not a term that has anything to do with THE WHITEST SAND IN THE WORLD, but merely refers to the Emerald Coast’s proximity to Alabama.

Now let’s briefly mention the competition.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Hyams Beach, on Jervis Bay in New South Wales, Australia, holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the whitest sand in the world.  I searched the Guinness website and I could find no such record.  Also, suspiciously, the photo in the newspaper article making this claim shows an admittedly very white beach under an unnaturally blue sky.  A blue the color of toilet bowl cleaner under a black light.  Something is not right here.  I am no photographer, but I do know how to make white look whiter using Photoshop.  Come on mates!

Another serious claimant to the title is much closer to home. Geologists from Harvard University supposedly tested the sand from Siesta Beach, on Siesta Key, just south of Sarasota, Florida, and declared it to be 99% pure quartz.  So what? The beaches of the Emerald Coast are at least that pure (at least in the months before and after spring break) and it doesn’t take a Harvard scientist to attest to that.  And I think size should play some role in this contest.  With a total area of only 40 acres, Siesta Beach is about the size of one of our middling dunes on Santa Rosa Island.

It is true that in 1987 Siesta Key won the distinction of having “the whitest and finest sand in the world,” as a competitor in the Great International Beach Challenge, judged by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  What most people don’t know is that the contest was conceived by the convention and visitors bureaus of the neighboring Florida counties of Sarasota and Manatee, and as far as I can tell they were the only entrants. (I would have to obtain a trial membership to HighBeam Research to read the rest of the source article.)

As for the quartz on our Emerald Coast beaches, don’t let anyone tell you it was all washed down from the Appalachians by the Apalachicola River. Some of it was.  But the Apalachicola, which drains most of western Georgia, and whose main tributaries, the Chattahoochee and Flint, reach well into Blue Ridge country, did not even exist during the time most of the sand was making its slow tumble to the sea. 250 million years ago the Appalachians were jagged, snow-covered peaks as high as, some say maybe even higher than, the Himalayas.  They grew that tall over a period of about 100 million years, as Africa, North and South America, Europe and Antarctica crunched together to form the supercontinent of Pangaea.  When Pangaea broke apart the Appalachians were torn apart too. Today you can find the missing pieces of the Appalachians in such places as Morocco (the Anti-Atlas Mountains), Scotland and Norway.

It takes a long time – in this case a quarter of a billion years – for Himalayas to become Catskills.  Ground down by glaciers and carried to the sea by ancient rivers, the once lofty peaks created over time a massive shoulder of sediment at their bases.  At the very end of the process, the very, very end (the final .ooo4% of the depositional event, to be generous), pretentious hominids known as humans gave a name to this broad expanse of detritus: they called the part under water the continental shelf, and the part above the water they called the Atlantic coastal plain. And they saw that it was good.

It makes sense that the leading edge of the continent is draped in shifting quartz.  Silicon dioxide, or silica, is the most abundant mineral in the earth’s crust, so the huge mountain range now known as the Appalachians is substantially comprised of silica.  Quartz is the crystalline form of silica.

Sand beaches form where there is an abundance of wave action and a source of sand.  The source of the sand making up THE WHITEST BEACHES IN THE WORLD is the ancient coast of Florida itself.  As sea levels rose and fell during multiple ice ages over the last two million years the Gulf of Mexico took bites out of the coastline. Whether attributed to global warming or just the natural increase in sea level between ice events, the Gulf today is chewing up sand along the bluffs between Destin and Cape San Blas, and depositing it as fresh sand along Santa Rosa Island to the west.

The rise and fall of the sea over thousands of years is also evidenced by ridges of sand that were once barrier islands but are now part of the mainland.  One such remnant barrier island is now the peninsula separating Choctawhatchee Bay from the Gulf on which the City of Destin sits.  The same ancient landform continues west, forming the north bank of Santa Rosa Sound all the way past Navarre.

Now that you are armed with a little background on our beautiful beaches, please go forth and issue a challenge to beach dwellers around the world.  We of the Emerald Coast have THE WHITEST BEACHES IN THE WORLD.  Send this to everyone you know in Australia, South Florida, the Seychelles, Bora Bora, and the Harvard Geology Department.  Tell them we’re ready to take them on.

Sources:

“Gazing onto the World’s Whitest Sands.” Sydney Morning Herald. January 1, 2006.

Kwon, H.J. Barrier Islands of the Northern Gulf of Mexico Coast: Sediment Source and Development. Louisiana State University Press. Coastal Studies Series Number 25. 1971.

“Woods Hole Expert to Judge ‘International Beach Sand Challenge.’”  PR Newswire. August 18, 1987.

Wikipedia.com: Appalachians; Caledonian orogeny; Florida Platform; Quartz; Hyams Beach, New South Wales; Siesta Key, Florida; Beach

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 12:24 am and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.