The Sound of Sand

When we play on the beach, building sand castles and rubbing it into our younger brother’s eyes - we don’t often think of sand as a finite resource.

But it definitely is.

Our voracious appetite for concrete - and in the case of Arthur Dent, bypasses - has stripped billions and billions of tonnes of sand from our coastlines. The concrete industry is responsible for 8% of global emissions.

Not all sand is created equally, and some of it - like very fine desert sand - is entirely unsuitable for use in construction. This puts huge pressure on coastlines and sea beds, often in countries where regulation is weak.

The demand for sand in construction has created a ‘sand mafia’ which deals with illegally dredged sand. Stealing it from riverbanks and selling it in enormous quantities to construction companies. The construction companies make a profit, the fishing community in Tamil Nadu is forced from their homelands - it’s a tale as old as [checks watch] the Industrial Revolution!

This social and environmental tragedy means that many countries have belatedly banned the export of their sand, especially after an entire Jamaican beach, some 500 trucks of sand was stolen around 10 years ago.

Yet where there is criminality, there are clever people fighting back!

Dara Fitzpatrick from the University College Cork has been testing sand with a system called ‘Broad Acoustic Dissolution Spectroscopy analysis’ or BARDS. This system uses a small scoop of sand in a mild acid, which is monitored by sensitive listening equipment as the carbonate reacts. BARDS is then able to detect how quickly the pitch of vibrating sand changes and in doing so chart an indisputable acoustic signature of the sample.

The long and short of it being that if your sand is stolen, you can listen to it and prove the provenance - the British Museum could learn a thing or two here.

P.C: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy | BBC | 1981 | Douglas Adams