Sand & geology
Glass Beach
What's in the sand
Decades of municipal dumping at Fort Bragg produced the world's most famous glass beach. Relentless Pacific surf has tumbled the broken bottles into rounded, frosted pebbles of green, brown, white, and rare blue. The glass is gradually being worn away and the beach is no longer self-replenishing.
References: source 1
Predicted regional composition
Q-F-L (quartz, feldspar, lithic) fractions sampled from the GloPrSM global sand model at this beach's location.
GloPrSM v1.0.0 (IJ_QFL). GloPrSM is calibrated on modern river sand; beach sand in the same watershed is a reasonable proxy but not identical.
Got a close-up photo of the sand here?
Take a picture with a coin for scale and send it over. We're building a global grain-photo library and this beach isn't in it yet.