SAND by Oliver Lenzen

Almost every facet of nature is reflected in sand, because Sand was probably the first substance that marine organisms once encountered when they ventured the decisive first step towards land. Used only in the singular, sand is already the designation of a multiplicity. Around 70 photographs of grains of sand are to be found in this book, entirely detached from their context, withdrawn, that is, from sand as such. None of these individuals resembles another. It is almost too absurd to imagine that presumably no two grains of sand with completely identical characteristics exist on Earth. The discrepancy between the uniformity of the mass and the actual individuality of its components is particularly worth emphasising when one considers that, according to estimates, around 1 billion grains of sand are newly created on Earth every single second by erosive processes. And how does a grain of sand become round? Sand follows the dictate of gravity. It is transported by water, ice or wind and deposited layer by layer, from the sea coasts across the edges of the continental shelves, in the great basins of the deep sea. In this way, over millions of years, packets of strata kilometres thick form out of initially loose masses, which are then gradually compacted and baked together. Entire mountain ranges carried off by unstoppable erosion are ultimately to be found again in such sedimentary layers. The rocks newly formed in these depressions are in turn displaced by processes of plate tectonics and folded up into mountains, where they are once again subject to erosion and worn away. A grain released from the sandstone on a mountain ridge is washed down into the valley, and the cycle begins all over again. Cycle by cycle, the grain becomes rounder. According to rough estimates, a duration of some 200 million years may be assumed for each cycle. Small, very well-rounded grains could in this way have passed through seven cycles with a total duration of 1.5 billion years. The question remains whether there are more grains of sand than stars? No: above the more than 85.7 septillion grains of sand on Earth stretches a sky with 70 sextillion stars.