Sand & geology
One Cable Beach
quartz-dominant
What's in the sand
Bahamian Cable Beach is almost entirely oolitic aragonite — tiny concentric spheres of calcium carbonate that precipitate directly from the warm, supersaturated Bahama Banks seawater. Walking on oolite feels unusually smooth because each grain is nearly a perfect sphere.
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.
Q 89%
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.
One Cable Beach25.0763, -77.4036