Category: nature and travel

Grand sands (#10: a glorious sandy shore, sans sea)

Published December 20, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#10: a glorious sandy shore, sans sea)

“Rippled sand + moving water + rock” is one of my favourite natural “recipes”, especially when other humans and human-made structures are not part of the “mix”… or are only a tiny, discreet element.

“Remote” ocean beaches are not the only places that offer such delight.

The pictured location is much more than 1,000 kilometres straight-line-distant from any ocean shore – and there is absolutely no “straight line” (let alone “same-day”) transport route to one.

By definition, when a river flows through a valley that bears its name, that river’s bed is the lowest ground within the local landscape.

The pictured low spot – just a little upstream of where this river flows into one of the world’s most significant rivers – is more than 2,700 metres above sea level.

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Grand sands (#9 in series: “White Sand Lake”)

Published December 19, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#9 in series: “White Sand Lake”)

“White Sand Lake” is the most common (in English) of many and various names applied to this particular lake and/or its dunes or “dune mountain/s”.

To my knowledge, nowhere else on “our” planet is quite like it.

The alleged altitude of this Chinese lake’s surface is also “many and various”, but it appears to be at least 3,300 metres – approximately 11,000 feet – above sea level.

It sits right beside/below the Karakoram Highway, about 150 kilometres southwest of Kashgar (aka “Kashi”) in Xinjiang,

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Grand sands (#8 in series: dunes in a basin)

Published December 17, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#8 in series: dunes in a basin)

This post’s featured image is far from great, but it does show a particularly surprising place.

I took the photo through “our” vehicle’s tinted window, as we zoomed past the pictured dunes at 5.09 pm on 22 October 2019.

Nearby, was a very large, salty lake.

The nearest ocean shore was circa 1500 kilometres distant, in a straight line.

No “straight line” transport connects to that shore; reaching the nearest ocean beach would require an arduous one-way journey of circa 2,000 kilometres.

Unsurprisingly, this particular vicinity is sparsely populated.

However, when I took the photo we were just 100 or so kilometres distant from a metropolis which is home to at least two million people; we would reach it before nightfall.

Q: where in Africa were we?

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Grand sands (#7 in series: seeing red)

Published December 16, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#7 in series: seeing red)

In this series’ first six chapters all relevant sands were either on beaches, or in locations still not far from an ocean’s shoreline.

The next several posts take us inland, and to higher altitudes.

Australians – well, those who have travelled well west of the Great Dividing Range – are familiar with the “red” sands/sandy soils that are a feature of much of our “Outback”.

Q: what makes them red?

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Grand sands (#6 in series: questions, with musical bonus)

Published December 15, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#6 in series: questions, with musical bonus)

Q #1: what is the pictured jellyfish-like fragment from a (presumably) recently-deceased marine creature?

A: I do not know.

Q #2: upon what has it “washed up”, in very shallow water?

A: sand, obviously.

(on Lights Beach, at eastern end of William Bay National Park, on Western Australia’s south coast)

Bigger question: what is sand, exactly?

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Grand sands (#5 in series: the “Windows Screensaver” beach)

Published December 14, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#5 in series: the “Windows Screensaver” beach)

Wharariki is often cited as New Zealand’s most beautiful beach.

It is quite easy to reach, but its “remote” location – on the northwest “corner” of New Zealand’s South Island, – still keeps visitor numbers relatively low.

Screensavers are now out of favour, but for some years an image taken from a cave on Wharariki Beach was Windows 10’s default.

Thus – mostly, unwittingly – many millions of human eyes have (vicariously) looked across Wharariki’s sands to the Archway Islands.

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Grand sands (#4 in series: New Zealand’s big spit)

Published December 13, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#4 in series: New Zealand’s big spit)

New Zealand’s biggest spit is big, even if Australia’s biggest – the star of #3 in this series – is circa four times longer, and rather more massive.

Farewell Spit is the northernmost tip of NZ’s South Island.

As mentioned in the previous post, a spit is a highly dynamic landform; this is especially so if much of that spit is low-lying, bare sand.

At low tide, Farewell Spit’s “above water” length comfortably exceeds thirty kilometres.

At high tide, or during some storms, it is well shy of thirty kilometres; much of its far end then becomes a submerged sandbar.

My photo was taken at 6.10 pm in July 2010; it looks across from Terra firma to Farewell Spit’s firmest, tallest, best vegetated, most stable section.

Had I been looking down from a satellite or a high-flying plane, Farewell Spit’s appearance would have been altogether more singular.

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Grand sands (#3 in series: big spit)

Published December 13, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#3 in series: big spit)

Definition, ex Wikipedia:

A spit (cognate with the word for a rotisserie bar) or sandspit is a deposition bar or beach landform off coasts or lake shores. It develops in places where re-entrance occurs, such as at a cove’s headlands, by the process of longshore drift by longshore currents. The drift occurs due to waves meeting the beach at an oblique angle, moving sediment down the beach in a zigzag pattern. This is complemented by longshore currents, which further transport sediment through the water alongside the beach.

If a spit is extraordinarily long, long-established and well-vegetated, many people will fail to recognise that it is a spit.

This post’s big spit is not in the photo’s foreground, and does not have an enormous number of pelicans and cormorants standing upon it.

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Grand sands (#2 in series: “picture-postcard” beach)

Published December 11, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#2 in series: “picture-postcard” beach)

You are looking at the kind of beach with which Australia is particularly well-endowed.

Many Australians love to frequent such beaches..and to brag about them to Europeans.

Key features, all present here: frequently-intense sunshine, clear, unpolluted, “blue” water, plus plenty of clean and bright sand.

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Grand sands (#1 in series: aerial view of the Namib’s “sand sea”)

Published December 11, 2024 by Pelidoug

Grand sands (#1 in series: aerial view of the Namib’s “sand sea”)

Essentially, sand is a “marriage” of just two of our planet’s most common elements: silicon and oxygen.

Nonetheless, sand offers an astonishing amount of visual diversity.

In some parts of the world, if you look down from an aircraft – ideally, one flying relatively “low”, but high enough to render small plants “invisible” – you could be fooled into believing that everything within your field of view was 100% sand.

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