SAND by Oliver Lenzen

Almost all facets of nature are reflected in the sand

Sand was probably the first material that marine organisms once found when they took the decisive first step towards land. Used only in the singular, sand is already the name of a multiplicity. Around 70 photographs of grains of sand can be found in this book, completely detached from their context, thus removed from the sand as such. No two of these individuals are alike. It is almost too absurd to imagine that there are probably no two completely identical grains of sand on earth. The discrepancy between the uniformity of the mass and the actual individuality of its components is particularly striking when you realise that, according to estimates, around 1 billion new grains of sand are formed every single second on Earth through erosive processes.
And how does the grain of sand become round?
Sand follows the dictates of gravity. It is transported by water, ice or wind and deposited layer by layer from the sea coasts over the edges of the continental shelves into the large basins of the deep sea. In this way, over millions of years, kilometre-thick packages of layers are formed from initially loose masses, which are then gradually compacted and caked. Entire mountain ranges, which are removed by the unstoppable erosion, are ultimately found in such sediment layers. The rocks newly formed in depressions in this way are in turn displaced by plate tectonic processes and folded into mountains, where they are again subject to erosion and removed. A grain released from the sandstone at the ridge is washed down to the valley and the cycle starts all over again. Cycle after cycle, the grain rounds out. According to rough estimates, each cycle lasts around 200 million years. Small, very well-rounded grains could have gone through seven cycles in this way, totalling 1.5 billion years.
The question remains, are there more grains of sand than stars?
No, a sky with 70 trillion stars spans 85.7 quadrillion grains of sand on earth.