I saw a picture of sand under a microscope. It looked like beautiful tiny shells and even little starfish. But sand looks like brown sugar to me… why is it so similar looking in a huge group? Are all of the beautiful colors seen under the microscope some special sort of sand they are only using for photography?
In: Earth Science
Our eyes take in light that bounces off objects, and our brains only get so much ‘resolution’ out of the light that hits our eyes. So we can’t see perfectly clearly at long distances, and the farther away something is, the more it tends to seem like one big blob rather than individual ‘pixels’ (or just more detailed information). It’s like if you take a picture with an old camera and zoom in on the picture, it just doesn’t have as much data in the picture, so things kind of blur together more.
So when you look at sand far away, your brain doesn’t get enough detail to see differences on each individual grain of sand (whether that’s because of how your eyes work or just that your brain can’t process all of the data sent to it from your eyes, I don’t actually know). Since you only have so much detail, you’re basically looking at a slightly blurry picture.
But you don’t think of it as blurry because your brain focuses on the important things. It knows that you’re looking at sand and that there’s a lot grains of sand, but it doesn’t actually care what each individual grain looks like and doesn’t have enough detail on each individual grain anyway. So instead you focus on other things more, things where you can see more details or just things that are close to you. And then you don’t notice the blur, you just think of it more as an ‘ocean of sand’ than a zillion tiny, individual dots.
It’s in the same way as if you were to look up at the stars. Every bright sphere may look white to some extent, but looking closely, you can see that they have much more color to them. You don’t notice Mars being red or the colors on Jupiter. The planets, similar to sand, have distinct features that are too hard to point out at a distance.
When you look at it without the microscope, you’re seeing hundreds to thousands of grains at a time. All the little unique features get averaged out, and you just see…sand. Look up pictures of beaches with different colored sand to see how different minerals can cause sand to look all different colors. I visited a green sand beach in Hawaii, and most of the sand is made up of olivine, a green stone. It definitely looked very different, even at the large scale, than most beaches.
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