White Sugar Sand

I grew up near the southern tip of Lake Michigan, and we would occasionally go to the Indiana Dunes Lake Shore to spend time on the beach. That was my introduction to sand, and I can't tell you today what it looks like. Sand, I guess. It's soft, it sticks to your skin, you can build castles with it. Sand.

Here, the sand is noticeably different, and one of the first things new visitors say when first setting foot on the beach is "The sand is so white!", followed by, "The sand squeaks!"

Both things are true, and here's why. After the last ice age, minerals, specifically quartz, from the Appalachian mountains began washing down rivers and finding their way to the Gulf shore. Waves washed over them and ground the quartz into crystals—if you place the sand under a microscope, you can actually see the crystals, so they say.

This sand is just as good for making castles, and it still sticks to your skin, and it has the added advantage of being home to ghost crabs, which are fascinating to watch.

So, we can thank the ice age and gravity and water flow for what our beaches look like now. This photo here doesn't do justice to the landscape, but it's the best I have at the moment.

#ghostcrabs #whitesand #30A #EmeraldCoast