Through The Sandglass

Guest post: a gallery of sand photographers' styles

 
Kurt Meyer writes:

SHOOTING SAND

For the last 15 years, on and off, I have been collecting sand. The “off” times resulted from not having an answer to the question, ‘what do I do with all of this sand?’ I have tried various methods of displaying my sands as you can see below. Two-ounce bottles with overhead lighting being the best. 

But the only people who could regularly view the display were my wife, the neighbors, some family and my dog, Zena, and she could care less. In fact, anything that draws attention away from her is not well tolerated.

Things got interesting again, however, when I decided to try my hand at getting pictures of my sands. At first, I tried a digital microscope and although it turned out to be an interesting exercise, the quality just wasn’t there. The edges, for example, are usually blurry, the definition is often lacking and the color is rarely true. These problems would even be too much for a Photoshop package. You can, however, get a good idea of what is lurking in your sand sample at 20x, as in this image of sand from Fintragh beach, but it is not suitable for framing.

Today I still use the digital microscope but only for screening sand samples. It is pretty good at predicting which sands will be “photogenic.”

My first foray into serious sand macrophotography began with my purchase of a used Nikon D70. The following picture was taken with that camera body and a 60mm 1:1 lens. Even though the sensor is only a 6.1MP it still provides a pretty good image. This photo is of one of the famous green sand beaches in Hawaii, Pocket Beach to be exact. The olivine, lava and coral make a striking image [at the head of this post - MW]. 

At any rate, this new photographic endeavor answered the big question, ‘what do I do with all of this sand?’ Answer, SHOOT IT.

There are a number of photographers who do outstanding sand photography. I would like to showcase several of them. This is, by no means, an exhaustive list. This only reflects the photographers that have posted images on my website, Tropics of Sand. I will attempt to compare and contrast their styles. As you will see, the top photographers all have their own style. Over and above the camera equipment used, the thing that defines a photographer is their approach to getting the shot. All of the images that you will see below are unique to the photographer. I can tell a Heider photo from a Couette and a Sepp from a Kenney in the blink of an eye. I am sure that you will, too.

SAND PHOTOGRAPHERS

(click images to enlarge)

Leo Kenney: Large field, great clarity

Leo is a veteran of creating outstanding sand calendars and posters. He has a prodigious collection thanks to the fact that he has a legion of former students who dutifully send sands to him from their travels (cheater). Leo tends to zoom out a bit which produces a larger field than most. He uses a Canon 1-5x lens that allows him to get that clarity. Leo’s Picasa Web albums are here.

 
Clockwise from top left: Miller’s Point, Cape Town, South Africa; Monticello, Corsica; Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa; Rye, New Hampshire. Center: Cap Lardier, France.

Siim Sepp: Great definition of full field shots and individual grains.

Siim also uses the Canon 1-5x lens although Siim does more close up work. He uses a full field for some of his photos but he also shows exploded views of individual grains of sand elements. Siim has a “how-to” on the mechanics of getting a sand photo on his website, Sand Atlas. On that site, he also provides geological information on sand composition that is very informative.

 
Clockwise from top left: Diamond Head, Hawaii; Sapphire crystals, Songe, Southern Tanzania; Zakynthos, Greece; Waddell Sea floor (-3500m), Antarctica (Globigerina forams, yellow circles);  Center: Glass Beach, Kaui, Hawaii.

 

Alexander Heider: Tight shots, great color.

Herr Heider gets excellent close ups of his sands without sacrificing detail. As you can see in this series of sands from Ireland he is able to keep detail at close range. He also agonizes over white balance which gives very exacting color to his images. His tight shots and true color make his photos stand out.

 
Clockwise from top left, an Irish selection: Ardmore, Waterford; Ventry Strand, Dingle Bay; Dooagh, Achill Island, Fanore, Galway Bay; Center: Fintragh Bay, Killybegs.

 

Alain Couette: Soft shots, great detail.

Alain will not reveal what he uses as a lighting source but whatever it is, it gives his photos a “soft” look and it is also rich in detail. Alain has numerous images on his website, Arénophile ou Psammophile? He has sand pix plus images of forams that are very interesting. Alain has a distinctive style that I would recognize anywhere.

 Clockwise from top left: Boracay Island, Angol, Philippines; Nusa Lembongan, Ceningan Island, Indonesia; Rio Grande do Norte, Fernando de Noronha Island, Brazil; Luzon island, Nasugbu, Philippines; Center: Sanur, Bali, Indonesia

 

Carla Lagendijk: Daylight shots, great variety and picture perfect color.

Carla is one of the pre-eminent sand photographers today. As you can see her shots are very rich in detail. This is not due to the lens but the fact she shoots her photos in daylight, the sun illuminating every nook and cranny which in turn provides outstanding definition. The other thing that separates Carla from the pack is her prodigious collection. She has sand from anywhere you can imagine which greatly increases the chances of having outstanding material to work with. Below are 4 shots that typify her style, and of course, no examination of Carla’s work would be complete without a sample of one of her “selections”. These are selected bits of coral, forams, shells, etc., from various sand samples. I hesitate to use more than one for the simple reason that they are too awesome. If you can look at these all day, why would you look at anything else?

 Clockwise from top left: Bahia de Samana, Dominican Republic; Myrdal, Vik, Iceland (olivine and obsidian); Al Bustan, Oman;  Brétignolles, France; Center: Enubuj Island, Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands.

 

Kurt Meyer: Exploded views, contrasting backgrounds.

I now use a Nikon d1500 with the same 60mm lens. What I like to do with my photos is create an edge where heavy minerals or carbonate elements can be isolated from the main body of sand allowing for a better view of the individual grains. This has been dubbed the “black corner” technique. The 5100 has a 16.2 MP sensor that will enable you to enlarge photos without losing definition. Also, I use black or other colored glass as a background to provide contrast.

 
Clockwise from top left: Cape Point, South Africa; Dondra Beach, India; Mardakyan, Azerbaijan; Grand Ile, France; Center: Point Reef, Vanua Levu, Fiji.

 

You can see more photos by all of the above photographers on tropicsofsand.com. I would love to add more images this weekend but Zena has other ideas.

 

[All images reproduced with the photographer’s permission, composite formats by MW.

Kurt is based in Pennsylvania, and writes that while he has been photographing sand for the last three years, he has collected it for “15 odd years.” Nothing odd about that as far as I’m concerned, but perhaps those years were odd in other ways, and sand collecting represented an opportunity for normality. Interestingly, he enjoys diving for samples. Anyway, thanks Kurt for all the effort in putting this together – and thanks to all the arenophile photographers who contributed to this piece.]

An artist's view of Holland's inland sand seas

A while ago, I wrote a couple of posts on “the European sand belt, a great swathe of lowlands covered, more or less, by aeolian sand deposits originating from the chaos left behind by the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers,” the second with a focus on the Dutch dunes of Hulshorst in the Veluwe region. Recently, I was delighted to see a new comment on this post, from Francien Solitar, who wrote:

My stepdad was P.H.Mullaard. He lived in Ermelo and painted the Hulshorster zanddunes in more than one painting. (see: Mullaard.com) He spoke with a forest keeper there and he was told that, when there is a thunderstorm in the area, there seems to be an unusual amount of lightning flashes that hit the dunes and make craters in the ground.

I immediately went to the website that Francien is developing, showcasing Piet Mullaard’s works, and at the same time took the liberty of contacting her by email. This is yet another of those immensely satisfying “out of the blue” contacts that arise through the blog, and Francien responded immediately and graciously. She lived in the town of Ermelo (see the image below), and was a schoolteacher there before later emigrating to Canada in 1976.

As the website describes, “Piet Mullaard was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He lived and worked in Hillegersberg, Ermelo, Groningen and Bilthoven. He was an autodidact and worked as a painter and sculptor. He left a collection of about 150 paintings and 25 sculptures. Most of the collection is now in Canada.” Francien very kindly gave me permission to reproduce some of her stepfather’s paintings of the Dutch sand belt; the painting at the head of the post is  Sand Dunes at the Veluwe (1947, oil on canvas, 126 x 100 cm). Below are Uprooted Trees in the Sand (1946, oil on canvas,88 x 64 cm) and The Small Drift Sand (1946, canvas, 60 x 40 cm).

 

These are wonderfully atmospheric paintings in the great Dutch tradition, and a very satisfying link between landscapes, geology, sand, and art – thanks, Francien, for drawing our attention to your stepfather’s work!

 

[Photo with the Google Earth image from the Ministerie van Economische Zaken, Landbouw, en Innovatie website.]

Chinese New Year and an Indonesian Sand Artist

A few weeks ago, Chinese New Year was being celebrated. In Indonesia it’s known as “Imlek,” and Jakarta certainly celebrated. For us, this was truly remarkable since, when we were last here 20 years ago, you still had to vouch on the immigration form that you not only were not carrying explosives, but that you had nothing with Chinese writing on it. Some things have improved in the intervening years.

We are now in the Year of the Dragon – the Water Dragon to be precise; I was born, with no choice, in the Year of the Dog – but at least it was a Fire Dog. Dragons were everywhere for Imlek – especially in commercial locations where they might induce a level of exuberance that would lead to purchasing stuff. The absurdly (and, given the overall social context, disturbingly) ritzy mall in our building complex was no exception. And, along with the dragons, came events. My eye was caught by a small item on the poster announcing these, between “Fiddle with 2 Strings,” and the “Dainty Lotus Dance” - “Grains of Sand.” Mystified, I hurried along one lunchtime, and watched a performance by “Indonesia’s only sand artist.” This is the art  of telling stories via continually changing hand-sculpted images in sand on an overhead projector. One of its celebrity proponents is Kseniya Simonova, who won “Ukraine’s Got Talent” with her work a couple of years ago. It may not be “great art” in the traditional sense, but it’s compelling to watch, it’s highly creative and requires impressive skills – I certainly couldn’t do it.

 

The Indonesian artist, “Denny Darko,” performed wearing a blindfold, and his story, topically, was “The Legend of Lotus Flower and the Dragon King.” You find your attention switching from the artist to the screen, watching his hands moving, pouring, scattering, and sculpting the sand, the grand sweeps dramatic, the small details meticulous and mysterious, images appearing and dissolving. And one of the compelling aspects is the expectation – a scene begins to take shape, but you have no idea what exactly it will be, until a detail begins to emerge and all is revealed. No, it may not be “great art,” but it’s really impressive, fascinating to watch, and a great way of visually telling a story.

A couple of images and a short movie:

 

Nikon’s Small World – and other images

 
Each year, Nikon holds its Small World microphotography competition and the results can always only be described as stunning. This year is no different – but with the added element of sand appearing as the 14th place winner, the image above by Yanping Wang of the Beijing Planetarium.

Browsing through the galleries of winners, Honorable Mentions, and “Images of Distinction,” one of the (many) things that is striking is the art of nature’s patterns and designs, a theme superbly covered in the books by Philip Ball, Nature’s Patterns – A Tapestry in Three Parts. Scale has little role in all this, and I found it entertaining (not to mention awe-inspiring) to flip between the microscopic and the huge – specifically, the glorious gallery published earlier this year by Time, “Our Beautiful Planet: Images from Space by an Astronaut Photographer.” The images were taken by Paolo Nespoli:

European Space Agency Astronaut Paolo Nespoli — who first traveled to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 2007 — photographed a unique and stunning image of the space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station on a recent Soyuz mission. During a 159-day mission aboard the International Space Station, Nespoli managed to find time, despite his full schedule of duties, to capture footage for a documentary film, First Orbit. Combining historic voice recordings of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight, the documentary charts the view that Gagarin saw during his historic mission. In addition to this footage, Nespoli also took many still images of Earth. LightBox presents a selection of these photos that show our planet as a beautiful abstract canvas.

“A beautiful abstract canvas” indeed; but then put some of these images together with the Small World – the viewer can be hard-pressed to determine scale at all:

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, Mar 2, 2011; Douglas Moore, University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, Agatized dinosaur bone cells, unpolished, ca. 150 million years old (42x)

 
Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisúa, CMRB - Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Neurons growing over astrocytes in a human stem cell embryo body (20x); Desert, Somalia, January 30, 2011

And then the “abstract canvas” is on display in quite extraordinary ways in the microscopic world:

Dr. Michael M. Raith, Steinmann Institut, University of Bonn, leucite crystal from volcanic rock showing polysynthetic lamellar twins formed by the cubic- tetrago (40x); Dennis Callahan, California Institute of Technology, Department of Applied Physics & Materials Science, Cracked gallium arsenide solar cell films (50x)

But, this being the blog that it is, I shall finish with the following image of sand dunes in Saudi Arabia – or is it actually a biological photomicrograph?

Christine Gruwez on sand and the art of Elvira Wersche

 
As I was browsing the stunning website of Elvira Wersche, whose installation and performance art works were the subject of the guest post by Carla Lagendijk earlier this week, in the “press” section I came upon a piece by Christine Gruwez. It struck me as lyrical and poetic, words responding to the art, and a reminder of the roles that sand plays in the symbolism of our imaginations. Here it is:

 

Sand is hushed earth. Earth, purified and refined. Refined by wind, sun, and rain. Refined by sweat and by the tears of those whose feet have trodden on it. And refined by every hand that has turned it over, grasped it and returned it to itself. Sand is also liberated earth. In sand, the earth is released from its lassitude. At last.

Sand is the earth’s memory. In layer after layer it preserves the traces of ephemeral human existence. It is the sand that remains and offers enduring little signs, like a panoply of stories: countless fragments, occasionally a jewel or a sun-baked tablet bearing an inscription, or the dust-decayed remains of an addition to some grave that has long since vanished. Only an imprint remains.

How fragile is human existence! How enduring is sand! Also: how selfless it is. It absorbs everything, down to the minutest impression. For everything – without exception – a place is found, within its multiple layers. Sand stores and preserves while transforming itself at the slowest imaginable pace. And it becomes colour, in crystal landscapes.

Sand can assume any shape while remaining itself. Sand is pure potential. In the words of Aristotle, matter is nothing more than the infinite potential for acquiring form.

With sand that has come to her from all parts of the world, Elvira Wersche makes this boundless receptivity visible. Long before she stoops over a designated surface to map out the initial contours of a vibrant geometrical pattern, others have stooped to collect sand for her.

Their names are called as in a never-ending litany, and as a hymn to the earth, they reply:

Finely-ground desert sand from Mongolia, the Sahara or the Thar Desert.
Heavy earth from England, Poland or Kazakhstan.
Volcanic earth from Iceland, Pompeii and from Sicily’s Mount Etna.
Red sand from the ruins of Jordan’s holy city of Petra.
Sand from the Machu Picchu Inca temple in Peru.
Sand from a Zoroastrian fire temple in Iran.
Sand from Srebrenica, Vietnam and Korea.
Sand from Uganda, from Israel.
Sand from Ground Zero in New York.

The instruments used by Elvira Wersche possess the same simplicity and clarity as sand: a piece of chalk attached to a length of string, a small tea-strainer, a little piece of cardboard to designate boundaries. With these rudimentary means she creates a marvellous whole, in which each shape responds to each other shape − just as in music, every sound mingles to produce and to express a whole. Every proportion bears the mark of the most perfect of all proportions: the ‘golden section’.

In an act that retraces the elementary principles of creation, the sand, silent and at rest, is stirred into motion and made to sound. It is lifted up and renewed in its own nature. The sand has had to travel a long way – quite literally – until it could express itself in a new composition in this place, in patterns of near-magical colour and form. What follows is an act of consecration to the sand.

Then comes the moment at which it must move on. And so Elvira Wersche proceeds, in a vigorous, dazzling ritual, to erase the patterns again, and to reduce colour and form to a single mixture. After which small portions are dispensed to the visitors, who take it away with them to their destination, wherever this may be.

The journey continues.

[This was written in August 2009. Christine Gruwez studied philosophy and Iranian studies. Her work focuses on dialogues between religions and cultures. She has published on Christianity, Islam and manichaeism. The images at the head of the post are taken from Wersche’s Qutri, a 2009 work at the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin; the image above is from De transformatie, Helmond, Netherlands, 2003.]

Modern mandalas: a guest post on the stunning art of Elvira Wersche

 
Tibetan sand mandalas, powerful images of ephemerality. Gathering, design, and dispersal, the never-ending journey of Buddhism and sand grains.

And recently, thanks to my arenophile friend, Carla Lagendijk, I have been alerted to a modern exponent of the sand mandala. Elvira Wersche’s works are faithful to both the art and the spiritual symbolism of the traditional mandala, at the same time created through dramatic modern designs. Carla was fortunate enough not only to witness one of these extraordinary performance art events, but also to meet and talk with the artist. It seemed natural that Carla should write of this herself – all that remains for me to do is to exhort you to watch the video she links to – it is compelling and hauntingly beautiful. Over to Carla:

During a few cultural weeks in June in Leiden, the Netherlands, I had the pleasure to watch a sand artist creating a sand mosaic, named “Shamseh”, on the floor of the “temple hall” in our Museum of Ancient History. Creating the mosaic should take her 3 weeks after which a special final performance with dance and music was going to follow.

 
The artist was Elvira Wersche (German/Dutch). Her website: www.elvirawersche.com

She was creating her sand project of 6x7 meters in front of an ancient Egyptian temple, a very appropriate location. The inspiration for her kind of work she got many years ago during a visit to the Friday Mosque of Isfahan in Iran were she studied the fantastic designs on the walls.

About 10 days before the final performance I visited Elvira twice while she was working on her design. About 600 bags and bottles of sand were lying around and I could see how, sitting on her knees, she was carefully filling up the triangles. The geometrical pattern looks simple but at a closer look it has a very intricate, dynamic design of circles and triangles, which had been drawn on the floor beforehand.

She showed me the several kinds of sand. Some she had collected herself, most of it had been generously given by known and unknown travellers, sometimes combined with information about the origin of the sample: historical/ archaeological sites, holy places, deserts, sand from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, etc.

She sometimes examines the content through a magnifying-glass but the structure of the sand is more important for her work. It is the history of mankind behind the location of the sand that fascinates her most and fits to the underlying idea for her projects. Sand is not only a product of natural geological processes but also a silent witness of the long development of the human race. It reveals a piece of earth history but also hides a lot of secrets. This is the mystical side of it.

But….. however fascinating this all is….. what about the grains??

I saw a lot of sandstone sand with lumps in it which of course needed to be sieved. Sand of volcanic origin, dark reddish sand which looked like laterite, desert sand from Mongolia, carbonate sand, even the snowy white powdery dolomite stuff with pyrite from the Lengenbach quarry in Switzerland. She also showed me some sand which was useless for her purpose: an Asian beach sand which almost completely consisted of larger foraminifera. Of course these little critters roll to all sides. As I was very interested, she gave me half of this material.

The third time we visited the museum was for the final performance.

That evening the mosaic should be wiped out, following the idea of the Tibetans with their mandalas (nothing lasts forever). However, the way it had been done was not at all Tibetan like, but probably more impressive. It made me feel a bit sad to see Elvira’s work being destroyed, knowing it took her 3 weeks on her knees to create this stunning piece of art but I must confess, it had been done in a delicate way by 2 young good-looking girls (twins), light-footedly dancing over the pattern and mixing the sand with their long black skirts (later with their hands) accompanied by dark tones of a strange musical instrument. It fascinated all the spectators. They were dead silent. Needless to say that the dust, hovering in the hall, partly contributed to the strange atmosphere!

website museum: www.rmo.nl. YouTube video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfGQhT0ZFTI

At the end of the performance we all received a bit of this mixed “world sand”:

It is clear that this sand contains a combination of grains, impossible to find together in nature. At first sight it already has too many different colours. Second: the shape of the grains is far too varied: angular, rounded, etc. Looking closer you can start an imaginary world trip through volcanic fields and over beaches, pass colourful sandstone areas and find yourself  back in quarries or sandpits.The pyrite is down in the middle. And even a white foram is in the right hand corner.

 

[The illustrations above are from Elvira Wersche's website, but are not from the performance that Carla describes; they are of Taqsim - Teilung, a 2009 work at the Landesmuseum fur Natur und Mensche in Oldenburg, Germany. The video is of the Leiden work, including the recycling by the twins. World Sand photo by Carla - thanks to her again for everything.]

Strange and wonderful designs

 
Just what exactly is going on here? There is, as far as I know, no answer to that question – and that simply adds to the sense of wonder, of mystery. I first used this image in Sand, as an illustration of the intricate and unfathomable artistry of nature and sand; it came from Martyn Gorman who has the good fortune to live close to  a wild stretch of dunes on Scotland’s east coast. His photographs are spectacular, and showcased on his site, where he writes that:

I am fortunate to live within sight of the fabulous Sands of Forvie on the northeast coast of Aberdeenshire in Scotland; a complex of mobile sand dunes and beaches of great beauty and scientific interest. I never cease to be fascinated by the constantly changing forms and patterns to be seen in the sand and by the plants and animals that live there.

This particular photo was taken in 2006; recently he wrote to me with the words “They have returned!” and attached this image:

So this is clearly not a one-off phenomenon: something is going on, a conspiracy of sand and physics - and maybe a little chemistry - that inevitably results in these complex and compelling sculptures. But I can only repeat the question – what exactly is going on here? Isn’t it wonderful?

 

{Images copyright, and reproduced with thanks with the permission of, Martyn Gorman; make sure you visit his site.]

A long-tailed black swan visits

A quick visual inspection of the visit stats for this blog reveals a rather startling anomaly: in general a typical day will see a couple of hundred visits, but when I first checked on Tuesday morning the figure was well over 2000 and ended the day close to 4000. I was, to say the least, astonished. There was also highly anomalous twitter and facebook traffic, and it rapidly became clear that all this excitement originated from a post on Reddit, which in turn originated from this, about the extraordinary sand art of Andrew Clemens. This became linked to a very recent episode of Antiques Roadshow broadcast from Des Moines, Iowa, where the State Historical Society hosts a collection of Clemens’ work and kindly gave me permission to reproduce images in the book. This all led to a cascade – indeed, an avalanche – of links and the unprecedented, unpredictable, and unique event on this blog.

The segment on the TV program is well-worth watching – for the moment, at least, it’s available on the New Hampshire Public Television site – the discussion of Clemens begins at around 22 minutes.

What happened has, when I think about it, always been within the universe of possible events, but well outside the historic metrics and the limited world of expectations – hence this post title. When I wrote the “Sandpile world” post last week, little did I think that this would be dramatically illustrated by imminent events on the blog itself!

 

[By the way, Sandglass will shortly be travelling to distant parts – a couple of posts have been pre-scheduled for the coming week, and I hope to be reporting “live” soon thereafter.]

A sand enthusiast - and a creative idea

I’m not at all clear why it should be so, but it seems to be a fact that continental Europe is home to far more people who enjoy the fascination, beauty, and diversity of the sands of the world than is, even in proportion to population, the UK. I’ve written a little about sand enthusiasts, arenophiles, before, and those whom I have encountered, even virtually, are Italian, French, German, and, in particular, Dutch. My own very modest collection has been very much enhanced and augmented by the generosity of two Dutch collectors, one of whom I shall focus on today. Carla has not only sent me a wide-ranging selection of samples, but also pointed to beaches of interest along the French Atlantic coast prior to my grand expedition last year – for example, the spectacular garnet placer sands of Bretignolles. She and I continue to share information and ideas by email, and not long ago she wrote that she and her husband were off to Utrecht for a special “sand day” put on by a couple of the local geological societies. I was impressed to learn that there was sufficient general interest to organize this kind of thing – has there ever been such an event in the UK? But I was further impressed to see what Carla and her husband had prepared for the exhibition: six display boxes, each on a different sand theme –  and each with descriptions of origins, uses, minerals, and organisms of the sands displayed. These are not only beautifully and thoughtfully made, but they are highly informative, educational and attention-grabbing – three examples are shown at the head of this post (click on the image to enlarge). Of course, the text is in Dutch, but visual quality and effect is visible to anyone. Here's the detail of part of the display on mineral sands:

I asked Carla if she would describe the ideas behind these boxes and the way they are put together. Here’s what she wrote (and, by the way, she confesses concern about her English – I’m sure that any reader will agree that Carla’s command of a non-native language puts the rest of us to shame… And I had to check on passe-partout: it’s what is otherwise referred to as card mat, or mountboard, used in framing)

My exhibition boxes (size 35 x 45 x 5 cm)

As my sand collection has grown to almost 13.000 samples I felt the urge to finally think up something more useful to do with the sand samples than what I did before. The choice of sand samples is now quite extensive. So….why should I not bring more people into contact with this material in all its aspects by showing them a varied choice of samples together with some text and pictures, so they will never again say: “Isn’t sand just sand?”

By means of several self-made exhibition boxes I can show people many different types of sand samples: (heavy) mineral samples, biogenic samples, desert samples, river samples, etc.

More boxes will follow next year, to start with one about the size and appearance of sand grains. Actually this will be the most important one of them all, but..well.. that’s how I am..

The self-made boxes have a painted wooden frame covered by a glass plate, which can be taken out by removing one of the top laths at the short side, which has been screwed on to the box for this purpose.

The lay-out inside contains a passe-partout (the kind to frame photographs), in a colour matching the samples (desert sands!). Several quadrangles have been cut out for text and pictures. Some pictures are my macro photographs of sand. Because I do not always carry a microscope this is a good alternative for people to get an idea of the kind of sand.

I fixed the plastic boxes with sand (micro mount boxes or a larger kind, often used for minerals, micro fossils, tiny crystals, beads, seeds) on to the passe-partout with pieces of double-sided tape.

The paper for the text is a special kind of paper which will not discolour. At least…..that’s what I have been told.

As the wooden boxes are not really very large I noticed its limits too well, but alas, my house is not a palace and one has to keep count with the available storage capacity. So size is important and, more or less to my regret, the additional information had to be rather brief. As a Dutch person I decided to use my own language as the purpose of the boxes is mainly to show them on occasional meetings or exhibitions here in the Netherlands.

Designing the boxes was actually great fun, every case got its own appearance. I hope people will start to think differently about sand after a close look at the contents.

Carla.

I think that this is fantastic, and can only salute her enthusiasm and creativity. She would also seem to be extremely well-organized – here are some photos of a minute part of her collection (and note how dramatically the sands of Australia, on the left, capture its geology, and contrast it with the composition of New Zealand, on the right).

So many thanks, Carla – and keep up the good work! Any closet emulators hiding in the UK, or do I have to go to the Netherlands?

I’ll finish with one of Carla’s stunning photos – the foraminifera Ammonia beccarii from Corsica, relatives of the critters that have appeared in some of my Sunday Sand series.

Benoit Mandelbrot: a personal story

Over twenty years ago, I read James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science and was instantly gripped by the exotic world of strange attractors, Cantor sets, Julia sets – and, of course, the celebrated Mandelbrot set. This was simple mathematics revealing deep and unexpected wonders – exotic, yes, but immediately resonant of the world around us. You could see nature’s mathematics just by looking out the window. And, of course, a significant component of nature’s design style is fractal, and it was Benoit Mandelbrot who revealed this to us. Mandelbrot died on the 14th October and there has been, appropriately, an outpouring of praise  for this truly extraordinary man and his brilliant work. I won’t attempt to add to this, but I will tell a story: the story of when I met Benoit Mandelbrot.

Twenty years ago, I was far from alone in my enthusiasm for fractals – the concept is powerful and the mathematics shows up in so many, often unexpected, places. Like many others, I became somewhat carried away with my enthusiasm, seeking fractal geometries in every data set. I departed from what seemed to me a rather boring topic that I had been invited to address at a Financial Times Conference in London: having briefly prognosed the outlook for oil and gas exploration in southeast Asia, I launched into a (reasonably well documented) lesson in how the diviners of oil prices should seek help from fractal analysis in their hopeless task. This was not unreasonable, since Mandelbrot had demonstrated how other commodity prices demonstrate fractal characteristics, but a standing ovation was conspicuous by its absence and I was never invited back.

 Fractals, however, show up in many aspects of geology – bed thicknesses in sedimentary piles, grain sizes, the spaces between sand grains (vital for the porosity and permeability of a sandstone reservoir), and characteristics of faults and fractures, to name but a few. At that time, I was working in international exploration for “big oil,” the US company ARCO, to be specific, subsumed not long after into – oh dear – BP (but I had left by then. One of the great pleasures of that job was that the company had wisely – or, more probably, through an accident of real estate management – located my group in the same building as the research labs. The stuff that went on in those labs was fascinating, and I spent a lot of time keeping track of what they were up to and staying in touch with some of the really smart people working there. It was one of my friends in the labs who called me up one day, and told me that Mandelbrot was coming in – would I like to join the discussion? The question was one of those where the Pope and bears figure in the answer.  

There was, sensibly, little in the way of a formal agenda for the meeting, the intention being to show Mandelbrot some of the problems vexing the research group and open up the space to see how this remarkable mind viewed the problem – the discussion was wide-ranging and certainly not focussed on fractals. I will have to admit that I found the prospect somewhat intimidating – after all, this was the Benoit Mandelbrot. But the reality was a delight, a gentle, thoughtful, man who put effort into listening before he would begin to ask questions. And, of course, it was in his questions that the value lay, the possibility of insight; the science we were talking about was often not familiar to him, and so his questions were intriguing – and challenging. The conversation moved on to oil and gas explorationists think about the earth’s subsurface, and the term “play” came up. “What do you mean by that?” asked Mandelbrot, and all the heads in the room turned to me. So, there I was, explaining something to Benoit Mandelbrot....

Now, a “play” is a concept that helps the evaluation of how likely it is that, below the earth’s surface, an area, or a given group of rocks will have the components of the geological conspiracy that is necessary to create oil and gas accumulations. There are a number of key ingredients, perhaps the most important being a source rock – most commonly a shale, a rock that contains sufficient organic material to brew hydrocarbons; no source rock, no play. And then there’s the maturity of those source rocks, how well they have been cooked in the earth’s kitchen; immature source rocks, no play. Add in all the other components – a plumbing system for oil and gas to flow through, then something that stops that flow – a trap – and something sufficiently porous to contain the trapped oil and gas – a reservoir – and you have a means of describing a play. Each of the components can be assigned a risk of whether or not it is present, and the chances of it working, and so the further work needed to define these components can be identified and different plays compared. All this was not easy to explain, but Mandelbrot’s questions along the way were not only illuminating in making me think about what I was really trying to describe, but they were thought-provoking in general. I don’t, today, remember many of the details, but I certainly remember the experience, the rare opportunity to be challenged by the thinking of a brilliant individual.

It’s interesting how, in the meantime, the power of fractal geometry has been increasingly recognised, and how more and more examples have been identified. I was just reading a recent New Scientist article on “The chaos theory of evolution” that commented that “the history of life is fractal. Take away the labelling from any portion of the tree of life and we cannot tell at which scale we are looking. This self-similarity also indicates that evolutionary change is a process of continual splitting of the branches of the tree.” But we still haven’t figured out exactly what to do with fractals. They have revolutionised computer graphics, but their deeper meaning continues to elude us. However, the idea of scale invariance and self-similarity in nature’s designs continues to provoke and stimulate. Take, for example, this work by the artist Alison Cornyn; titled Sand and Moon: “The top image is a portrait of two grains of Coney Island sand. Below it is a NASA image of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars.” This is part of Cornyn’s larger project, Sand Portraits, of which probably more later. But for now I just wanted to mark my gratitude to Benoit Mandelbrot for an unforgettable and intellectually enriching experience.

 

[There’s a great video from February this year of Mandelbrot talking at a TED conference on “Fractals and the art of roughness” here (the site includes a number of other videos). Amongst many obituaries, the one from The Economist is a good starting point. For a description of her work by Alison Cornyn, and full credits for the images, see http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/everythingthatrises.contest35.html. The photograph of desert boulders comes from a 1933 newspaper report of one of Ralph Bagnold’s expeditions.]