SplendidSands
Exploring the Science and Beauty of Sand
Economic Sands
Ilmenite product, Chemours Mining, Starke, Florida
LP Kenney
Everything we depend on is either made from minerals or relies on minerals for its production. Minerals make transportation and communication possible. We rely on minerals for art, jewelry and paint manufacture. We rely on minerals for building skyscrapers, parking garages, medical devices, tools and much more. Geologists are known to say, “if it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”
Below are featured some minerals found as sand.
This pure quartz sand is mined from the Mt. Simon sandstone for frac sand near Grantsburg, Wisconsin. The grains’ uniform roundness and size makes this sand useful in the fracking industry.
Crushed bottle glass by Dreyden Aqua for filter material for swimming pools, drinking water, and aquaria.
Using floating dredges on the Rogue River, Oregon, gold miners vacuum up heavy mineral deposits from which they recover gold flakes.
Chemours Mining in Starke, Florida mines heavy-mineral sands for ilmenite. It’s used for white pigment in paint, paper and edibles (candy and toothpaste) and more.
Chemours Mining in Starke, Florida mines heavy-mineral sands for zircon. It’s used in the production of ceramics (your white toilet) and in sand casting (airplane turbines).
Chemours Mining in Starke, Florida mines heavy-mineral sands for staurolite. It’s used as a sand-blasting abrasive.
Small nodules of azurite (blue) and malachite (green) weather out of the poorly-cemented sandstone at La Sal Mine, Whistle, Utah. Today these copper ores are mostly mined as mineral specimens.
Wave polished iron minerals make up the beach sand at Topinetti Beach, Rio Marina, on the island of Elba, Italy.
Since the 1950s, a high pressure, high temperature (HPHT) method has been used to grow diamonds from graphite dissolved in metals such as nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum, manganese, and palladium. These diamonds are used as abrasives.