Sand From the Mountains
Near Destin, Florida
The beach here squeaks under your feet and glows almost blindingly white, and both of those things are clues to where it came from. This is not ordinary sand. It is nearly pure quartz, and it did not originate in Florida at all.
It began hundreds of miles to the north, in the Appalachian Mountains. At the end of the last Ice Age, quartz rock in those ancient mountains slowly eroded and broke down. Rivers, including the Apalachicola, carried the tiny crystalline grains southward over enormous stretches of time and deposited them along this stretch of Gulf coast.
The grinding of ice, rock, and water polished each grain into a fine, rounded, talc like powder, so soft it squeaks when you walk on it and so pale it can look like snow in the summer sun. The same quartz explains the water. When sunlight passes through the shallow Gulf and reflects off that bright white bottom, it favors the green and blue wavelengths, and on a calm day, when the sediment has settled and the water is clear, the whole sea takes on the glowing emerald color that gave this shoreline its name, the Emerald Coast.
You are standing on a mountain range that traveled here one grain at a time.
