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Jul 13, 2008 10:50 pm US/Central
'Microphotography' Of Sand Blends Science, Art
(WCCO)
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Inland beaches are amazing too, such as the sand at Lake Winnibigoshish in northern Minnesota.
Gary Greenberg
Summer time means beach time, and all that sand you bring home with you. What's amazing is that every grain of sand and every beach in the world is unique.
Time turns the sand of the every beach over and over. It is the story of the earth. Look closely, as they say, and you can see the world in a grain of sand.
Gary Greenberg found that to be true when he put some sand under a microscope one day.
"And I expected to see little brown rocks. And I was completely surprised," recalled Greenberg.
Surprised enough he decided to capture it in
microphotography. Magnified about 300 times, his work erases the line between science and art.
"You begin to realize that every grain of sand has an entire story to tell. It's come from somewhere and it's going somewhere. It's eroded from somewhere, it's maybe been a little bit of a sea urchin spine that broke off and rolled around in the surf. A lot of these grains of sand are rolling around in the surf for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. And they become eroded away and opalescent and absolutely beautiful looking," he said.
Just like no grain of sand is the same, the sand on every beach is unique too. In fact beaches right next to one another can be quite different.
Forensic scientists have known that about beaches for a long time. There was once a murder case solved just by matching the sand in a suspect's cuff to the sand at the scene of the crime. It's like every beach has its own signature.
A beach in Okinawa, Japan is amazing when you get close up.
"When you look it as sand, it just looks like white sand. You can't tell that it's these beautiful puffy stars," said Greenberg.
He goes on to explain the biology behind a starry piece of ocean sand.
"Every little grain of sand is made from a protist. A protist is like a little protozoa, a single cell protozoa. And it makes this little shell of a house that it lives in, " he said.
On an Irish shore, different-shaped protist shells mingle with other forms of aquatic life, such as the internal skeleton of a sponge or the spine of a sea urchin.
"I haven't been able to identify them all. I have to send them to friends who are geologists or biologists and see what they think," he said.
Inland beaches are amazing too, such as the sand at Lake Winnibigoshish in northern Minnesota.
"The mix of minerals is just really impressive looking and just beautiful. Now if you look at that sand with your naked eye, it would look like grayish-colored sand," he said.
Greenberg invented the technology behind the beautiful pictures.
"You take many, many photographs at many focus levels, so many of these may be 20 or 30 focus photographs deep," he said.
The pictures are in his new book, as well as a small show at the Science Museum in St. Paul.
"When people see my pictures of sand, they almost invariably say, 'I never walk on the beach the same way again. I never see sand the same way again. And when I go to a beach, I look closely and see what's there.' That's the message I'm trying to get over. To see the world in a new way always, because the world always is new," said Greenberg.
The show at the Science Museum goes through October. It's near the Collector's Corner, where there's an amazing collection of sand from all over the world.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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