Young Brunette Girl Wearing Necklace In The Sand Of The Rocky Coast

The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions. The bright white sands found in tropical and subtropical coastal settings are eroded limestone and may contain coral and shell fragments in addition to other organic or organically derived fragmental material. The gypsum sand dunes of the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico are famous for their bright, white color. Arkose is a sand or sandstone with considerable feldspar content, derived from the weathering and erosion of a (usually nearby) granitic rock outcrop. Some sands contain magnetite, chlorite, glauconite or gypsum. Sands rich in magnetite are dark to black in color, as are sands derived from volcanic basalts and obsidian. Chlorite-glauconite bearing sands are typically green in color, as are sands derived from basaltic (lava) with a high olivine content. Many sands, especially those found extensively in Southern Europe, have iron impurities within the quartz crystals of the sand, giving a deep yellow color. Sand deposits in some areas contain garnets and other resistant minerals, including some small gemstones.
Environments
Sand is transported by wind and water and deposited in the form of beaches, dunes, sand spits, sand bars and related features. In environments such as gravel-bed rivers and glacial moraines it often occurs as one of the many grain sizes that are represented. Sand-bed rivers, such as the Platte River in Nebraska, USA, have sandy beds largely because there is no larger source material that they can transport. Dunes, on the other hand, are sandy because larger material is generally immobile in wind, and are a distinctive geographical feature of desert environments.