CompuServe Messages

Hi, Kamron <<I looked at Black Muck Clay and found that it was 99% almost clear quartz sand>> What was the 1% that presumably gave it the appealing name "black muck"? Some of the more interesting sands in my collection are the single-mineral sands that occur in some areas where heavier minerals are sorted by wave or current action into concentrated deposits. The most common of these seems to be magnetite sands, which are nearly 100% black magnetite. I have samples from New Zealand and Costa Rica. I also have a purple sand from a lake beach in northern Saskatchewan, that consists of about 95% garnet. Many sand samples from tropical beaches contain amazing varieties of microscopic shells, including foraminifera, ostracods, tiny gastropods; and other objects such as sponge spicules, which come in a variety of bizarre shapes. Some of the pink sands from various beaches in the Caribbean (Bermuda, Barbados) are colored by red forams. Howard