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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?
Comments closedWharariki 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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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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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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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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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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