Gerald Brooks: The world is running out of sand, it's becoming a commodity

To The Daily Sun,

Perhaps we shouldn’t go down this road but then it isn’t just well traveled but is one of New Hampshire’s older roads running from Massachusetts to Canada. Not only that but it passes through the center of the state in Ashland. Just at the border of Bridgewater and Plymouth the land is being leveled.

The world is running out of sand: bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand. The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, farmlands and forests torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved in to the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand.

“The issue of sand comes as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t,” says Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher with the United Nations Environment Programme. “We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives.”

As it was the change in climate once covered NH with ice at least 400 feet deep. As recently discovered in Greenland the ice over land melts at the bottom more so than the top. Having changed again a few thousand years ago, NH stripped totally of plants and trees was a barren landscape of granite and sand.

Tens of thousands of years of grinding granite flushed with melting ice produced sand, lots of sand.

Thanks to climate change the sand is being stripped and sold, a valuable and limited supply. Much as the shores of our lakes become shore front property and mountain tops lined with wind turbines mining our dollars to companies overseas.

Gerald Brooks

Meredith