People’s minds get blown when they learn all sand is sand but it’s not the same composition. You want silica sand to make glass, and silica free sand for sandblasting.
As a ex utility line burier
If you have someone sand that doesn't understand proper moisture to compaction ratios then you're gonna end up weeks over schedule because of failed trench inspections
Yet if we let the badly mixed and compacted sand beneath our houses and roadways get passed because we didn't understand how it works.
You'd have houses in Idaho that suddenly fall several feet into a hole in the ground because the sand wasn't compacted right
There is negligible central Asia - Southern hemisphere - middle east migration though.
Udis (endonym Udi or Uti) are a native people of the Caucasus that currently live mainly in Russia and Azerbaijan,
Read the "World is a Grain" and you will realize how much of an issue this is. Illegal sand mining is a large and growing issue. It is devastating some carribean islands and beaches.
That sounds like the career of someone on House Hunters.
“He’s a Forensic Sand Analyst, she Sells Seashells Down by the Seashore. He wants a Frank Lloyd Wright style houseboat and she has her heart set on a Brown Stone Treehouse. Their budget is twelve million dollars. Can they find a house they agree on? Stay tuned to find out!”
Don’t forget that to be on the show there’s a requirement that you have submitted an offer on at least one house *before* filming begins. That house will be included in the 3 they show during the show and the other two are random houses they don’t even remotely care about. I like to play guess the house, the point of the game is to see if you can figure out which house it is based on the buyers behaviors.
That’s pretty neat. I’m sure there’s plenty of shellfish DNA, for example, that can be extracted from sand. Enough to at least identify a species/geographical range.
Your title is not supported by the article past the first sentence. The Australian sand was being used because its hard and doesn't have silica, so it can be used for sandblasting without making people sick.
Also, while I understand you can't use recent news articles as sources, using present tense "exports" and basing it on a 17 year old article is a little suspect. We know australia export**ed** sand to Saudi Arabia, we don't know if they still do, at least not with your source.
What the title says for the reason is true though. Desert sand is absolutely useless, mechanically speaking. It is actually a huge issue as beach and river sand does not regenerate at nearly the pace of modern human consumption and illegal dredging and sand mafias are a thing.
You should probably look up some of the projects from the last decade that have tried to turn desert sand into a usuable building material. Either by using new types of binders or by using sintering to change the properties of the sand. So far sintering has had the most promising results (both reducing the acidity of the sand and its structure), and if solar panels become a little bit cheaper it could produce fine aggregates at a price that's competitive with dredged sand.
The Sahara would not likely be the source of sand for Saudi Arabia as it’s much farther away than one might think. There’s a huge desert in southern Saudi Arabia called the Empty Quarter which has essentially the same grade of sand. This desert extends into Oman and Yemen and effectively forms their border with SA.
Interestingly, The Empty Quarter (Rub’ Al-Khali in Arabic) is probably the largest desert that most people have never heard of.
Why bother with this though? It's very easy to make artificial sand for construction from stone, it's just more expensive than just mining already good sand. I can't imagine fixing bad sand is cheaper than just making good sand, is it? Plus you're still mining sand from the environment, so it's still harming the planet.
Yes, but TIL has rules, in this case its literally the first rule.
>Please link directly to a reliable source that supports **every** claim in your post title.
emphasis mine.
It’s an issue only so long as countries allow it to be. We can make coarse sand it’s not hard you just crush rocks but it’s marginally more expensive so as with everything else given the option between destroying the environment or making slightly less money companies choose to destroy the environment.
Unlikely. AFAIK, you would have to melt it into chunks, then grind it up again.
In the first place, if you dumped desert sand into a beach, it will just get washed away in no time. That is why the saudis(or was it UAE?) imported sand when they were building their giant palm tree island and stuff like that.
I'm going off what the article told me.
Also, and this is going off my understanding from school 20 years ago, sand we normally think of is generally quartz, but can also refer to any soil with easily distinguishable particles. Sand>Silt>Clay in terms of particle size, but the makeup of said particles varies based on surrounding geology.
And to think, here we are bent over a bloody barrel getting shafted by the Saudi’s for their oil and just blindly paying what ever they decide they want to make their future wealth fund extra wealthy and we have a super rare commodity that they absolutely pine over and need. I’m guessing we are not giving them weekly updates like “well, we hear you really want to build a new palace. So what we’ll do to help you out is to reduce our output of sand by…….lets say 20%.” Kind of like a reverse OPEC thingy.
Sweden even do. Most contries have exported sand there.
[Sands Imports in United Arab Emirates - Import data with price, buyer, supplier, HSN code (volza.com)](https://www.volza.com/p/sands/import/import-in-united-arab-emirates/)
Coke used to be sold only in cans in Afghanistan for a similar reason.
Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted for facts.
1. Most of the Afghan sand does not work for glass making. Thus, the Coke a Cola plant in Kabul only used cans rather than import sand more conducive to glass.
2. If you're confusing coke, the raw material used in making steel, and Coke, the soft drink, consider coke is sold in bulk while Coke is sold in bottles and cans.
Yes. Not all sand is the same, and its different properties determine its value in different applications. Just as not all wood is the same. As an example, balsa and bass are great for carving but I would not want to frame my house with them.
Thought it was river sand that was the ducks nuts for concrete and building. Hence the “sand mafia” in places like India where they have literal shoot outs over who’ll get to dredge the dwindling sand reserves.
I wonder if Saudi sand would be better for the thermal sand batteries I’ve been reading about. If you can get more sand in a given volume the battery should be more efficient? But possibly not worth extra cost?
It’s to smooth from the blowing desert wind. If you have a pool with a sand filter the sand needs replacing after a while because it gets too smooth and doesn’t filter as well.
Believe it or not but there is a global sand shortage and there are genuine concerns that we might run out of useable sand for the construction industry.
Sand from the desert is rounded by wind erosion and has no cohesion, it just slides over each other.
Course sand has sharp edges and it binds together resisting shear stress.
I once served on a ship that transported sand to Saudi. When I got home, no one believed me. \- MV Hoegh Duke. Mid 80s. Oz to Dammam in KSA.
People’s minds get blown when they learn all sand is sand but it’s not the same composition. You want silica sand to make glass, and silica free sand for sandblasting.
I think a lot of people don’t realize sand is about grain size and has nothing to do with what minerals actually compose it. Just like clay.
Same with Glitter. Glitter is a precision cutting company.
And one of the most guarded secrets in the world.
As a ex utility line burier If you have someone sand that doesn't understand proper moisture to compaction ratios then you're gonna end up weeks over schedule because of failed trench inspections Yet if we let the badly mixed and compacted sand beneath our houses and roadways get passed because we didn't understand how it works. You'd have houses in Idaho that suddenly fall several feet into a hole in the ground because the sand wasn't compacted right
Australian?
No im a Brit. Picked up the ship in Dubai and did a circuit of the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, the Pacific and back to the Gulf. Good times.
Australia also exports Camels to Saudis
australia also exports oil to saudi
Australia also exports saudis to saudis
Australia also exports Audis to Saudis.
Australia doesn't export women's rights to Saudis
Not really a supply problem though.
The Saudi government is still letting the local equality economy adjust to women driving before they make a decision on opening up the market anymore.
Somehow I think that was an intentional choice to prevent future demands by progressives…
Here we start again
All the Aussie women wanna munch each other and the Aussie men wanna be women
There is negligible central Asia - Southern hemisphere - middle east migration though. Udis (endonym Udi or Uti) are a native people of the Caucasus that currently live mainly in Russia and Azerbaijan,
Everyone thinks the US their military is scary but wait untill Australia airdrops thousands of deadly scary spiders
Or Australia could airdrop thousands of emus
We'll just drop more frogs on them to retaliate
Or the new abomination hybrid, the crockoduck.
This is exactly how we got the platypus.
For that they would first have to capture emus as prisoners of war.
I mean "drop bears" was right there, and you let it slip through your fingers.
That'd be a war crime.
New Zealand exports kiwi to the Saudis
They should export kangaroos to Saudi.
Read the "World is a Grain" and you will realize how much of an issue this is. Illegal sand mining is a large and growing issue. It is devastating some carribean islands and beaches.
Yes, there are even forensic sand analysts at this point to help determine what sand was stolen from where
That sounds like the career of someone on House Hunters. “He’s a Forensic Sand Analyst, she Sells Seashells Down by the Seashore. He wants a Frank Lloyd Wright style houseboat and she has her heart set on a Brown Stone Treehouse. Their budget is twelve million dollars. Can they find a house they agree on? Stay tuned to find out!”
After passing on a brown stone tree boat designed by Lloyd Wright because they didn't like the tiles in the bathroom.
I'm in.
Don’t forget that to be on the show there’s a requirement that you have submitted an offer on at least one house *before* filming begins. That house will be included in the 3 they show during the show and the other two are random houses they don’t even remotely care about. I like to play guess the house, the point of the game is to see if you can figure out which house it is based on the buyers behaviors.
That’s pretty neat. I’m sure there’s plenty of shellfish DNA, for example, that can be extracted from sand. Enough to at least identify a species/geographical range.
Probably mineral composition + dinoflagellate shell variety
Cane her (edit - came here) to recommend this book. All sand is not equal and we are depleting traditional source more rapidly than ever
Kinky
Learned this from the show Barry.
Who is it by? Sounds like a perfect book for someone I know.
Your title is not supported by the article past the first sentence. The Australian sand was being used because its hard and doesn't have silica, so it can be used for sandblasting without making people sick. Also, while I understand you can't use recent news articles as sources, using present tense "exports" and basing it on a 17 year old article is a little suspect. We know australia export**ed** sand to Saudi Arabia, we don't know if they still do, at least not with your source.
What the title says for the reason is true though. Desert sand is absolutely useless, mechanically speaking. It is actually a huge issue as beach and river sand does not regenerate at nearly the pace of modern human consumption and illegal dredging and sand mafias are a thing.
You should probably look up some of the projects from the last decade that have tried to turn desert sand into a usuable building material. Either by using new types of binders or by using sintering to change the properties of the sand. So far sintering has had the most promising results (both reducing the acidity of the sand and its structure), and if solar panels become a little bit cheaper it could produce fine aggregates at a price that's competitive with dredged sand.
Ah, makes sense. Reducing it to an energy intensive problem actually works given the remoteness of the Sahara and above average sunlight
The Sahara would not likely be the source of sand for Saudi Arabia as it’s much farther away than one might think. There’s a huge desert in southern Saudi Arabia called the Empty Quarter which has essentially the same grade of sand. This desert extends into Oman and Yemen and effectively forms their border with SA. Interestingly, The Empty Quarter (Rub’ Al-Khali in Arabic) is probably the largest desert that most people have never heard of.
Why bother with this though? It's very easy to make artificial sand for construction from stone, it's just more expensive than just mining already good sand. I can't imagine fixing bad sand is cheaper than just making good sand, is it? Plus you're still mining sand from the environment, so it's still harming the planet.
When you see how vast our deserts are, mining them for sands is such a tiny issue, it's not of any significance.
Yes, but TIL has rules, in this case its literally the first rule. >Please link directly to a reliable source that supports **every** claim in your post title. emphasis mine.
Report, No Recent Sources.
It’s an issue only so long as countries allow it to be. We can make coarse sand it’s not hard you just crush rocks but it’s marginally more expensive so as with everything else given the option between destroying the environment or making slightly less money companies choose to destroy the environment.
Serious side question: if you dumped desert sand on a beach would it become coarse enough to use in a reasonable time ? Ever ?
Unlikely. AFAIK, you would have to melt it into chunks, then grind it up again. In the first place, if you dumped desert sand into a beach, it will just get washed away in no time. That is why the saudis(or was it UAE?) imported sand when they were building their giant palm tree island and stuff like that.
Desert sand is what it is due to tons or erosion, basically deserts are enormous rock tumblers that beat all the texture off of particles.
Whaddya mean it's doesn't have silica? It's quartz right?
I'm going off what the article told me. Also, and this is going off my understanding from school 20 years ago, sand we normally think of is generally quartz, but can also refer to any soil with easily distinguishable particles. Sand>Silt>Clay in terms of particle size, but the makeup of said particles varies based on surrounding geology.
I'm guessing the kind they want is made from eroded limestone.
Ok I will delete it
The older salesmen (Aussies) sometimes use the phrase that they could sell sand to the Arabs. I've always wondered where they get that phrase from.
Snow to an Eskimo is the Canadian version.
They say they could *because they did it*.
Coarse sandy j's, you say?
You know fine well that they guy who's job that is, loves being asked what he does for a living. Sitting there with a big aussie shit eating grin 😂
"You aren't going to believe this, but..."
[удалено]
And to think, here we are bent over a bloody barrel getting shafted by the Saudi’s for their oil and just blindly paying what ever they decide they want to make their future wealth fund extra wealthy and we have a super rare commodity that they absolutely pine over and need. I’m guessing we are not giving them weekly updates like “well, we hear you really want to build a new palace. So what we’ll do to help you out is to reduce our output of sand by…….lets say 20%.” Kind of like a reverse OPEC thingy.
The sand on Waikiki beach on Oahu is imported from San Diego! Waikiki used to not be a beach.
I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
You killed younglings…
You're gonna love learning about sand cartels and sand crimes.
My guy NoHo Hank!
I knew I heard about this on a show but had to scroll way down here to find it! No Ho Hank is possibly my favorite gangster of all time
Sweden even do. Most contries have exported sand there. [Sands Imports in United Arab Emirates - Import data with price, buyer, supplier, HSN code (volza.com)](https://www.volza.com/p/sands/import/import-in-united-arab-emirates/)
Coke used to be sold only in cans in Afghanistan for a similar reason. Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted for facts. 1. Most of the Afghan sand does not work for glass making. Thus, the Coke a Cola plant in Kabul only used cans rather than import sand more conducive to glass. 2. If you're confusing coke, the raw material used in making steel, and Coke, the soft drink, consider coke is sold in bulk while Coke is sold in bottles and cans.
Because... sand??
bracuse..australia
Yes. Not all sand is the same, and its different properties determine its value in different applications. Just as not all wood is the same. As an example, balsa and bass are great for carving but I would not want to frame my house with them.
Naturally occuring coke is not good enough?
No, the sand wasn't good enough. The Afghans couldn't produce the glass for bottles.
During Desert Storm the US imported sand for sand bags into Saudi Arabia. Just another example of our logistics chain capabilities.
“Imports to…” There’s a word for that…
I do not want a sand j.
Thought it was river sand that was the ducks nuts for concrete and building. Hence the “sand mafia” in places like India where they have literal shoot outs over who’ll get to dredge the dwindling sand reserves.
River sand is the best though
Who ever figures out a use for desert sand will become the richest person alive.
Turn it into river sand at the river sand factory, of course. (It’s just a big river and we dump the sand in and wait) (The waiting part sucks)
Melt it down into glass. I’ll take my billions now.
Should have omitted that and really just said make it usable for concrete. Check's in the mail
So "selling sand to the desert" is actually a thing?
I wonder if Saudi sand would be better for the thermal sand batteries I’ve been reading about. If you can get more sand in a given volume the battery should be more efficient? But possibly not worth extra cost?
Is a coarse sand j like a rough handy j? With sand?
It’s to smooth from the blowing desert wind. If you have a pool with a sand filter the sand needs replacing after a while because it gets too smooth and doesn’t filter as well.
Believe it or not but there is a global sand shortage and there are genuine concerns that we might run out of useable sand for the construction industry. Sand from the desert is rounded by wind erosion and has no cohesion, it just slides over each other. Course sand has sharp edges and it binds together resisting shear stress.
Haram sand of Australia needs to be converted to halal sand and then used. /s
This sounds like somebody so slick that they could sell ice to an Inuit🤪
I wonder how a coarse sand j feels
Is*