Through The Sandglass

Sunday sand: grains, chains, and biofilms

I guess that, if you wanted to write story for kids that illustrated the idea of the food chain, it could go something like this:

One evening, as the sun was setting over the beach, Walter the warty sea cucumber (although he preferred his grander name, Parastichopus parvimensis) was enjoying his usual dinner of sand. From in between the grains, he selected juicy, crunchy, and delicious meifoauna, delighting in the variety of flavours. But, unfortunately for Walter, among them, Nemo the nematode had just finished his dinner, and that had included some scrumptious morsels of Maribacter polysiphoniae, a very uncultured microbe. Now, Walter hated the taste of Maribacter polysiphoniae, and attempted to spit out his mouthful. But, being a warty sea cucumber, Walter couldn’t spit….

Well, perhaps there’s a good reason why I haven’t tried my hand at writing children’s stories. But I did write (unbelievably, just over two years ago) about meiofauna, the staggering diversity of miniature critters that live in the spaces between sand grains. Alarming as the idea of a zoo in your sandcastle might be, I commented how grateful we should be to the meiofauna, for they graze on bacteria and so keep our beaches clean. But what, exactly, are these bacteria? Well, at the head of this post is a portrait of a small sample on the surface of a sand grain. This extraordinary scanning electron microscope image comes from the work of Anthony D'Onofrio and his colleagues at the Antimicrobial Discovery Center of Northeastern University in Boston. This particular study has as its focus the bacterial life on intertidal sand grains from Canoe Beach in Nahant, Massachusetts, and, scrutiny at  successively higher magnifications reveals this (taken from the paper by D’Onofrio and others available online):

 
What we are looking at are incredible communities of bacteria – but these are not just any communities, since they have united together to cling to each grain as a biofilm, and biofilms are startling and mysterious forms of life. Isolated bacteria, floating around in the seawater, are referred to as planktonic, but when they alight on the surface of a grain of sand and team up, something amazing happens: the whole becomes greater than – and very different from – the sum of the parts.

Now I, for one, did not know much about biofilms until I came across these amazing images a while ago. But I should have done, since I carry them around continuously, and encounter them frequently. My quest for further understanding of these constant companions led me to the superbly informative website of the Center for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State University. Herewith, from their “Biofilm basics” section:

You may not be familiar with the term "biofilm," but you have certainly encountered biofilm on a regular basis. The plaque that forms on your teeth and causes tooth decay is one type of bacterial biofilm. The "gunk" that clogs your drains is also biofilm. If you have ever walked in a stream or river, you may have slipped on biofilm-coated rocks.

Biofilm forms when bacteria adhere to surfaces in moist environments by excreting a slimy, glue-like substance. Sites for biofilm formation include all kinds of surfaces: natural materials above and below ground, metals, plastics, medical implant materials—even plant and body tissue. Wherever you find a combination of moisture, nutrients and a surface, you are likely to find biofilm.

A biofilm community can be formed by a single bacterial species, but in nature biofilms almost always consist of rich mixtures of many species of bacteria, as well as fungi, algae, yeasts, protozoa, other microorganisms, debris and corrosion products. Over 500 bacterial species have been identified in typical dental plaque biofilms. Biofilms are held together by sugary molecular strands, collectively termed "extracellular polymeric substances" or "EPS." The cells produce EPS and are held together by these strands, allowing them to develop complex three-dimensional, resilient, attached communities. Biofilms can be as thin as a few cell layers or many inches thick, depending on environmental conditions.

And here’s their illustration of the biofilm life cycle (perhaps “bio-horror film” might be a more appropriate name – this is going on in my mouth?):

Biofilms are, quite literally, everywhere, and they present huge puzzles and mysteries. But understanding exactly what they are and how they work is vital. Efforts to combat bacteria focus on their planktonic manifestations, but biofilms are different, and are more resistant to attack than their free-floating versions. And what is more, the traditional approach to developing antibacterial weapons and strategies is to culture the critters in the lab and experiment on them. Pluck a bunch of bacteria from the environment and 99% of them will prove to be “unculturable” – they simply won’t grow in the lab. So what makes them grow in nature? This is where the work of D’Onofrio and his colleagues comes in – they are identifying the growth factors produced by culturable bacteria that trigger growth in their previously unculturable relatives. It would seem to be an extremely complex relationship in which some members of a biofilm community are intrinsically critical for the growth of others – it’s one big co-operative.

This has to be related to another extraordinary characteristic of biofilms: their DNA expression – which genes are switched on and producing proteins – is different from that of the same group of bacteria when they are separate; a biofilm is a different kind of organism in its own right. It’s no wonder that the Center for Biofilm Engineering describes how

The study of biofilms has skyrocketed in recent years due to increased awareness of the pervasiveness and impact of biofilms on natural and industrial systems, as well as human health. Biofilms cost the U.S. literally billions of dollars every year in energy losses, equipment damage, product contamination and medical infections. But biofilms also offer huge potential for bioremediating hazardous waste sites, biofiltering municipal and industrial water and wastewater, and forming biobarriers to protect soil and groundwater from contamination. The complexity of biofilm activity and behavior requires research contributions from many disciplines such as biochemistry, engineering, mathematics and microbiology. New insights into the mysteries of biofilm are being published daily in a wide variety of science and engineering journals.

But there are always two sides to every coin, and the story of bacteria and sand is no exception. The prediliction of planktonic bacteria for alighting on a grain of sand and massing themselves into a biofilm is the basis for slow sand filters. Originally developed in the UK in the nineteenth century, and influential in the eradication of cholera, these water filtration systems continue to be used for metropolitan water supplies and, in modern refinements, on a small scale in developing countries. The basic principle is simple: a biofilm forms on the surface of a bed of sand and continues to attract micro-organisms from the passing water. The biofilm or Schmutzdecke (another wonderful word) builds up significantly, removing up to 99% of the bacteria from the water – but, of course, eventually the sand must be cleaned. This technology is now very sophisticated, and so, although we have yet to understand how it all works, we should be grateful for the attraction of the surface of a grain of sand to passing bacteria.

[The extraordinary scanning electron microscope images are reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, courtesy of the Lewis Lab at Northeastern University. Images created by Anthony D'Onofrio, William H. Fowle, Eric J. Stewart and Kim Lewis.]

Guest post: psammophilic chanterelles

Dear Michael,

In the past week, I've been the fortunate recipient of six new samples for my sand collection! From Florida and Alaska, they are welcome additions to my collection. It now spans both poles and every continent save Australia. (Australia, anyone?…)

I've always enjoyed just looking at my samples and reflecting on their origins, but as I have told you, reading Sand has made the collection so much more meaningful and interesting. And as I have come to realize how ubiquitous and unappreciated sand really is, barely a day has passed that I haven't observed some satisfying psammophilic signals in my surroundings! Thank you, again, for sharing your knowledge.

According to my calendar, our first conversation roughly coincided with the emergence of a rather spectacular "bloom" of the eastern smooth chanterelle mushroom (Cantharellus lateritius) in the woods behind my home. Rivalling its more famous cousin, the yellow chant (C. ciborium, a.k.a. the pfifferling or girolle), this mushroom is beautiful and tasty. It temporarily became the focus of my spare time, and I would walk the dog or take my children into the woods for some quality mushroom gathering before the season slowly ended two weeks later.

We happen to live on a hill in Northeastern Ohio. It's a little college town, surrounded by pastures, Amish communities, and forest. Most of the land on "The Hill" was burned and clear-cut in the early 19th century for farmland, and eventually became the home of a theological seminary that evolved into a modern-day college. Somehow, a few small tracts of forest remained untouched and to this day represent some of the largest stands of virgin beech-maple forest in the state of Ohio.

In the recent geologic past, about 10K years ago, the hill was deposited by an enormous melting glacier. This glacier had scoured soil and rocks from the land below. Like a bulldozer, the ice pushed and lifted clay, sand, gravel and larger objects and dragged them southward as it advanced. In that load were millions of tons of rock from a series of earlier glaciers, themselves slowly gouging eastern Lake Erie from the shale and sandstone depression left over from the age of the dinosaurs. Eventually, the glacier melted, dumping piles of sand and rock material called "kames" and scooping out holes forming hundreds of "kettles" or small lakes which dot the area to this day. The streams running through the woods behind my house still bear sand that has only recently been freed from the sandstone boulders that form the hill. They will eventually enter the Ohio River in Pittsburgh before heading to the Gulf of Mexico to be compressed back to stone.

In between the glaciers and the clear-cutting, native Americans hunted deer, bear and turkey here. They gathered the available crop of raspberries and blackberries that are abundant. I like to think that they also enjoyed harvesting morels, oyster mushrooms, chanterelles and other fine edible mushrooms that still grow wild in the remaining forest.

The mushrooms grow here because they require unbelievably specialized habitats. Many are so specific that there is still no way to produce them commercially, and so the only way to enjoy them is to get out in the woods and harvest them personally. No one really knows, for example, what triggers each of the three (or so) species of morel to emerge -- what combination of nutrients, soils, moisture, etc. is required every spring to make them pop up, and eventually into, the mouths of their eager fans. So too, is the smooth chanterelle. We have observed it in isolated patches throughout the beech-maple forest behind my house. But mostly, it prefers oak. And mostly, it prefers paths!

As I mentioned, the forest here is dominated by beech and maple trees. However, species such as cottonwood and oak will occur if the soil conditions are right. Oak trees, and especially our local pin oak, Quercus palustris, live in habitats that are moist and comprised of clays and sands. As they grow, the roots form a network of tiny organic storage containers that the chanterelle can apparently tap without harming the tree, and perhaps even provide some unknown benefit in return. This is called a mycorrhizal relationship. So, the chanterelle, which is associated with the oak trees here, depends upon the sand and clay soil. But why paths? The best explanation I have read suggests that soil compaction plays a role. Where deer paths or human paths cross the sandy forest floor, the grains become more tightly packed near the surface where the mycelium of the fungus lives. So it bunches up at this interface between loosely packed and hard packed grains until environmental cues (temperature, moisture, and metabolic state) cause the fungus to fruit!

So, to tie this all together -- I've been enjoying the wonderful delicacy of chanterelle mushrooms collected from paths running below oak trees that are growing in sand and clay deposited by the retreat of a glacier thousands of years ago. Without that glacier, there would be no sand, no oak, no chanterelles!

I've attached a few pictures to jazz up my rambling. Thanks once again for transforming the seemingly mundane world of sand into something fascinating.

Rob Robertson

Hiram, Ohio

[I first heard from Rob about a month ago, another of those hugely pleasurable "out of the blue" e-mails that put me in touch with one of the readers of this blog. We shared thoughts and questions on Martian water and landforms, and, always seeking alternative voices, I asked Rob if he would like to write a guest post. I was delighted by his positive response and so here it is; modesty insisted that I contemplate how to deal with his complimentary comments, but it reads as it is, a personal letter, and much appreciated. So modesty was swallowed. And the discovery of the word the word "pfifferling" is to be treasured in its own right - I feel an omelette coming on.]

Sunday sand: portraits

 
When I wrote a while ago about the sands of Kefalonia and the mysteries of where exactly the homeland of Odysseus lay, I commented that one of the samples was clearly crammed with critters. However, at the time, I did not have the wherewithal to examine them in any great detail, this requiring more sophisticated scrutiny than my hand-held digital microscope, however clever, could offer. But now I am united with the wherewithal: a full-blown digital microscope on which I had splurged shortly before leaving the UK, and which has now completed its sedate journey to southeast Asia. I’ve been spending some escapist time playing around with it, and it occurred to me that the critters of Kefalonia would make ideal subjects for a series of portraits. In addition, a number of readers of this blog have asked about sand grain microphotography, and so, amateurish though my efforts are, I thought that this would be a good opportunity for at least a few thoughts.

So today’s post is really on two topics: the wonders of the biogenic components of sand and how to experience those wonders. The sand of Kaminia Beach on Kefalonia is, to the naked eye, a fairly unexciting collection of grains with an overall greyish tan colour – it makes, I’m sure, for a good beach experience and probably good sandcastles. Peering closely at it, still with the naked eye, reveals an enticing variety of shell fragments and other pale-coloured shapes, but magnification is the key to unlocking the spectacular nature of the contents of this sand: a veritable micro-zoological garden of shells and a showcase of design diversity. Many of the critters whose portraits appear in the images above are foraminifera, or forams in colloquial micro-bio-speak, and they have starred in a number of earlier posts. They are single-celled protists that construct their shells generally in a series of chambers and hundreds of thousands of foram species have been around all the environments of our planet’s oceans for hundreds of millions of years. Most live on the ocean floor, but some use their shells as flotation devices; most build their shells out of calcium carbonate, but some – the gloriously named agglutinated forams – construct their homes by meticulously gluing together sediment grains (for more on these and forams in general, see this earlier post).

But there are other critters in this Kefalonian sand, and, since the depth of my microfaunal expertise stretches no further than my knowledge of, say, string theory, perhaps I should open this up for more knowledgeable readers to engage in a “name that critter” session.

So now to the means of granular portrait photography. My new toy (like the hand-held low power digital microscope I described earlier) is made by Celestron; this blog does not do commercials, but I have to say that this is an impressive piece of kit.

It’s the “LCD Professional Digital Microscope Model # 44345.” It is, like most microscopes within the reach of the amateur, primarily for biological purposes – I have removed the superbly built mechanical stage (for conventional slides) in order to accommodate my larger dishes of sand. Like any good biological microscope, there are four objective lenses from 4x to 40x magnification; these combine with the LCD screen (which substitutes for the conventional optical eyepiece) to provide images of magnifications from 40x to 400x. For materials such as sand, it’s only the lowest power objective (and occasionally the 10x) that are of practical use, and so I simply have to accept that some of the power of this microscope remains unexploited. Importantly, the instrument provides both incident illumination (i.e., a light that shines on to the surface of the specimen) and transmitted light (from below); the latter has a number of diaphragm settings that can be experimented with. The digital capability is impressive: the LCD screen is clear and responsive (move the sample and there is no time lag in the display), and the on-screen options are easy to use (but for my purposes rarely necessary). The key is the built-in camera: it has a sensor resolution of 1600 (1600x1200 pixels) and this can be set to lower resolution or higher (through interpolation). Images are recorded in a 1Gb internal storage and can be downloaded by a USB connection to your computer; there is also an SD card slot.

The images are excellent, but it’s critical to have image manipulation software (I use Adobe Photoshop) for processing and refinement. I find that the colour balance of the original image has a green emphasis; this can easily be adjusted in Photoshop, as can light levels, cropping, and so on. With my previous system – a standard binocular optical microscope with a digital camera attachment – a custom white balance could be set up, but I don’t think that there’s a way of doing this with the digital microscope.

There is, of course, the inherent problem of a limited depth of field with 3D objects such as sand grains. The microscope has an excellent fine focus system, and so the optimal image can be carefully selected, but there are always parts of the image that are not in focus. I have recently been investigating what would seem to be some clever software, available online, that deals with this problem by selecting the in-focus parts of each of a successive series of images of an object and re-combining them into a single image; if anyone has experience of this, your views would be much appreciated (it would seem to work for landscape photos as well as microscopic images).

So, there we are, my latest toy. It’s a great instrument and, although, perversely, I would like one smaller magnification, it’s providing much pleasure, lots of surprises, and some decent images. Any comments welcome!

Meanwhile, some transmitted light portraits:

[For the ultimate high-tech microphotography of sand grains, see Gary Greenberg’s site and book;  but many arenophiles are also much more skilled than I am – for example, Catalin Stefan’s World Atlas of Sands website has great photographic galleries]

 

A book I look forward to reading

I have referred several times in the past to Orrin H. Pilkey, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology at Duke University. Now, together with colleagues from the US and Northern Ireland, he has published what promises to be an informative, entertaining, and provocative read - The World's Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline. 

I haven't, of course, got my hands on a copy yet, but a review in the New York Times simply confirms that anything by Pilkey is required reading. The review is titled "Shorelines, Sandy or Otherwise, That May Not Last." The conclusion echoes the issue that I posted on a couple of months ago:

But, the authors conclude, unless society chooses beaches over buildings the result will be a world in which parks like the National Seashores retain natural beaches, but beach resorts elsewhere are “heavily walled and beachless.” Rising seas will make sand-pumping operations “untenable,” they predict, and tourists will amuse themselves by “promenading on top of a seawall” — already the principal activity in too many coastal resorts.

If they are right, by then the beaches this book describes will be a nostalgic memory.

The book is published by the University of California Press, to whom I will ever be grateful for publishing mine, and the New York Times review is by Cornelia Dean, whose own book, "Against the Tide: the Battle for America's Beaches," also falls into the required reading category.

Sunday sand: recycling on the beaches of Bako

   

For Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Young American) 

Ashes to ashes, sand to sand – recycling is the name of the game on our planet. Essentially every sand grain that you might encounter washing along the beach, rolling in a river, skipping along the surface of a dune, is on but the latest of many journeys, travels punctuated by long periods of entombed repose, cycles of incarceration and liberation that have gone on for tens, hundreds, of millions of years. This week’s Sunday sand is a great example of this, from the Bako National Park on the coast of Sarawak,  Malaysian Borneo.

Thirty million years or so ago, great rivers carried cargoes of newly-liberated sand down from the mountains and dumped them in deltas along an old shoreline quite unrelated to today’s. Geochaos and geochemistry buried and lithified the sediments, turning them into sandstones that would later be unceremoniously heaved back up to the surface; for the moment, they play a starring role in the dramatic and colourful coastal scenery of this small National Park, but they are constantly exposed to the assaults of waves and the steamy tropical climate, disintegrating to release their grains back onto the beaches and launching them on their next journey. This sand is a perfect example of the recycling of local ingredients. But those ingredients include a little something extra. Over time, mineral-charged waters circulated through the sandstones, leaching and depositing minerals as the acidity of the local microenvironment changed. Most common among these minerals are iron oxides and hydroxides that provide the palette of pigments for the chemical artistry on display in these cliffs:

[Photos thanks to Bob Meredith’s travel journal at Bugbitten.com] 

But in these photos, it’s clear that this geoalchemy has gone even further – bizarre steel-black crusts seem to drape over the outcrops, as if something molten had been poured on them. Molten, no, but chemical, yes. The conspiracy of mineral-laden water infiltration, fluctuations in the water table, and original heterogeneity of the sandstones, has caused the formation of duricrusts, hard, irregular, iron-cemented bodies of sandstone, sometimes also called ferricrete (i.e., ferruginous concrete). The primary mineral is probably limonite, itself a mixture of hydrated iron oxide minerals; there may well be other components in there too, quite possibly manganese, for example. And this explains the strange appearance of the beach sand when scrutinised in detail (see the image at the head of this post). It looks as if one of those waiters who lugs around an unnecessarily huge pepper mill had stopped by and sprinkled his wares in the sand – myriads of little black grains. Look more closely, and there, in amongst the sharp and angular quartz grains, are what look like little rounded pellets. They are not magnetic, but they are relatively heavy – a little amateur panning in the kitchen easily separated them out. I am almost a hundred per cent sure that these are limonite grains, further smoothed and rounded from their original shape by the wear and tear of the waves; here are some of them in isolation (plus a free foram):

All this chemical activity has created huge variations in the hardness of the sandstones, and thus their resistance, or otherwise, to weathering and erosion. And it is this that has enabled the sculpting of the weird, wonderful, and artistic shapes of the cliffs of Bako National Park. An icon of this area is a magnificent isolated sea stack, along the base of which can be seen another weathering phenomenon common here – tafoni again (one of my favourite topics and an inspiration for the works of Gaudi). 

This photo comes from a superb series on Flickr by duke88. And, since all of the images are generously available for use through a Creative Commons License, I will leave you with another, patterns in the sand, nature’s sculptures, limonite and quartz.

 

[Thanks to Patricia, the latest recruit in my army of arenokleptomaniacs, for collecting this sand from Bako for me.]

 

Another margarita!

You live and learn – well, at least I try. And often I don’t even have to try – something I didn’t know (a category that knows no limits) just ups and surprises me. I read in the paper today about the birth of a sand cat (or sand dune cat, otherwise, Felis margarita). I wan't even aware that there were such critters as sand cats, and I certainly didn’t anticipate how damned cute they are. This sand kitten – above, with her mother - has just been born at the Ramat Gan Safari Park near Tel Aviv, Israel. The kitten is the first of the Sand Cat species, considered extinct in Israel, to be born at the safari park. “She has been named Renana and it is hoped that she will join Israel's Sand Cat Breeding Program in order to reintroduce the species back into the wild.” (3news, New Zealand). 

Sand cats are so-called because hairs on the soles of their feet have helped them adapt to their desert environment by providing both insulation and traction in the sand; herewith, from the BBC’s “Wildfacts” site: 

Sand cat, sand dune cat
Felis margarita

Like some other desert animals, sand cats are capable of surviving without drinking - they obtain all the water they need through their food.

Subspecies
F.m. margarita, F.m.harrisoni, F.m.thinobia, F.m.scheffeli.

Life span
In captivity, sand cats live for up to 13 years.

Statistics
Body length: 42-57cm, Tail length: 26-35cm, Shoulder height: unknown, Weight: 2-3kg.

Physical Description
Sand cats have a pale yellow, to grey-brown coat, which is slightly darker on the back and pale on the belly. A bold streak runs across each cheek from the corner of each eye.

The tail is ringed with a black tip. Sand cats have a broad head with large eyes and low-set ears. They have short limbs and dense hair on the soles of the feet. The hair on the feet serves to insulate against the intense heat and cold of their habitat, as well as aiding movement across the sand.

Distribution
Sand cats range across N Africa and SW Asia (Sahara to Baluchistan).

Habitat
Sand cats live in the desert and are adapted to extremely arid terrain.

Diet
They hunt rodents and occasionally hares, birds and reptiles. They are apparently able to survive without drinking free water, and obtain the moisture they require from their prey.

Behaviour
Sand cats are mainly active at night. They are good diggers which helps when hunting for underground prey and for digging the burrow that they rest in during the day.

Reproduction
Sand cats give birth to 2-4 kittens after a gestation period of 59-63 days. The kittens weigh about 39g at birth.

Conservation status
The IUCN lists the Pakistani subspecies F.m.scheffeli as Lower Risk. Sand cats are on CITES: Appendix II. They face persecution due to the threat they pose to livestock. F.m.scheffeli was not discovered until 1966 but has declined drastically through uncontrolled commercial dealing.

In a somewhat chaotic week that continues to consume time and mental energy, this has provided a fun (and yet informative) instant post topic. But it also reminds me of the sort of feline meme that went around the geoblogosphere not long ago, wherein photos were contributed of various cats in geologically resonant poses. Not owning a cat these days, I could not contribute, and even my daughter’s feline, Woody, has yet to show even a passing interest in the mineral and rock collection that should attract his limited attention on a daily basis – and hence provide a geofelino photo-op. But what this does do is give me an excuse, with no arenaceous connotations whatsoever, to post my photo of a quintessentially Indonesian cat that I recently found living in a quintessentially Indonesian tree. 

Sunday sand: Ngrayong

Tectonic turmoil has been a long-running production in Indonesia, even by geological measures. Thirteen million years ago, peaceful seas covered what is today eastern Java, but blundering plates soon put an end to the tranquillity. The entire island of Borneo was rotating counter-clockwise, at the same time suffering upheaval to the point where erosion became rapid and relentless. Huge volumes of quartz-rich sands cascaded southwards into the seas of East Java, burying the old, calm, seafloor in a thick blanket of shallow marine and deepwater sands and mud. Eventually, the seas were entirely filled with these sediments and rivers and deltas dominated what had been a marine environment.

Continuing upheaval would eventually raise these sediments back above sea level and expose them as sandstones in the river banks of eastern Java. They are on particularly fine display not far from the village of Ngrayong which gave its name to this particular pile of sedimentary archives. The grains of the Ngrayong sandstones are remarkably immature – they are sharp-edged and angular, their journey having been too short for any effective abrasion and rounding of those rough edges.

All of the grains in the images above are less than a fifth of a millimetre across, very fine-grained components that have been separated from their coarser companions by sieving. Why separate out these grains? Well, I came to have a bag of this Ngrayong sand not because I have visited the location, but because I was visiting the siever, so to speak; it turns out that these grains perform particularly well in a rather intriguing experimental application – but more of that for another post.

Where still buried underground, the Ngrayong sandstones themselves have also performed rather well for more than a century as a reservoir for oil and gas. The original discoveries were made by the Dutch in the days of colonisation; I did visit these old fields many years ago when I was in Indonesia before, for they are still producing and more discoveries, some of them very large, are still being made. But the real fascination was the in situ museum of industry history that the area represented – pieces of old equipment, venerable wheezing pumps and groaning fly-wheels still sedately in action. Unfortunately, all those photographs are in my archives back in London, but here are a couple of images from the 1920s, courtesy of the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands. 

 

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.]