On Lake Baikal, where I was, there is a small island - Ogoy, and there is a pink beach, and pink grains of sand consist of the mineral Garnet almandin, a very beautiful beach.
@@Just_Sara 50-50, it makes a very interesting effect, in water, this sand is a bright saturated pink color, and when you dry it, it turns pale gray-pink.
Thank you for bringing back, the geologic oddities series. One topic I recommend is the formation of the Pfeiffer Beach in California. It is somewhat similar to this green sand beach, but I don't know if there is any volcanic activity that close to the ocean in California. Keep up the great work!
Seems to be part of the Franciscan formations making it accretionary sedimentary material from the volcanic archipelagos which North America collided with during the Cretaceous . Traditionally they have been considered to been the result of a continental volcanic arc on the coast of NA but newer evidence suggests it was a situation more analogous to Australia and New Guinea + Indonesia where the passive margin of a continent is pulled into a subduction zone with its associated ocean slab jamming it up due to the density difference and cause the denser oceanic slab to break off releasing a wave of magmas (magmas which resulted in the formation of t he Sierra Nevada batholith based on the strontium and several other elements within their composition being a hallmark signature of slab failure induced melt production) to weld the arc to the continent and reverse the polarity of the subduction zone. Taiwan is another modern example where this process is ongoing.
I was there 2021 April. Let me tell you about this place. --First, you need a good 4x4. It's technical, with deep sand. Our rented Jeep did the job, but not for a novice, at all. No, it's not full of gemstones nore will you find any. The sand is green, barely. You get a handful and it's green all right. They hardly sparkle, but if you look closely, they do. It's a small crowded beach. No way you will have it to yourself. --I'm very pleased we took the time to visit this place and that it's the best of the 4 in all the world. One thing I will say about the big island. It's geology in real time. Do NOT step off the paths there. Foliage hides the cliffs 2 feet away. --Another thing you will find on the big island. Rent a Jeep Wrangler. Trust me, you will be glad you did. It will be white, so get that white shoe polish and mark your rear window "My Jeep", because there are 30 billion of these in that island and you'll find it faster that way. If you want to see the telescopes, you need the Jeep, required 4x4 to get there. Oh, do NOT go off the path going there. That mountain is a cheese grater for steel. Jeeps are tough, but not that tough. --Buying coffee: Don't go to the touring farms. If you circle the island, you will run into a ton of Ma & Pa coffee shops. "Their" coffee is every bit as good as the Kona, but a fraction of the price. You can export as much coffee as you wish. Makes great gifts.
We go to the Big Island a lot and rented a jeep once. It wasn’t worth it. Besides it costing a lot more than a regular car, it wasn’t as secure for keeping anything in it while parked, it was generally worn out (since jeeps are popular rentals, same issue with convertibles), it overheated when we tried driving up Mauna Kea volcano (since the rental co. does slapdash maintenance), and the rental co. yelled at us when we returned it with mud on it! If you want to go to the top of Mauna Kea I recommend using one of the tours that will drive you in a van instead. They’ll also provide parkas since it’s cold up there! Other than maybe Mauna Kea and a few very out of the way places like this beach, you can get anyplace on the Big Island in a normal car plus some hiking.
Ka’u coffee from the southern side of the island is being grown in a very different climate from Kona coffee. That’s part of the amazing thing about the big island… so many different climates.
There are places here with the same and on some areas it's greener because not on a beach but stuck between clifs. On purpose I don't give more details as I don't want too many to know. As always thanks a lot for your great work and hope to see you coming one day on our gorgeous tropical volcanic island ! Greetings from La Réunion.
Olivine rocks🤙🏼 I live in the Lower East Rift Zone and my property is full of these little clear green rocks that resemble broken beer bottles from the 1840 Nanawale lava flow. Great video🤙🏼
Aloha Professor Tim, I went to this beach once back in 1996 I believe and that was before I had moved to Oahu over 20 years ago. Not to far away from this beach is a black sand beach that was so great to feel on your bare feet. I believe this beach is gone now after the eruptions in 2018. Hawaii has so much to offer to this channel, just keep the videos coming…🤙🏻
A fun place to report on might be Topaz mountain in Utah. I haven't been there in decades but as a child our family went there. While colored topaz was rare, there were abundant clear stones on the surface. The geologic history of that place could be fun.
Geologist here: I have heard of this beach in my studies and always found it marvelous. I work in a mineralogical museum (university of bonn) and wish we had a sample of this beach. Olivine is a very intruiging mineral to me, and the thought of an entire beach made up of it is amazing. I wish to visit it someday and take a close look (albeit unfortunately no sample) on it. Thank you for this video, I found it very interesting and informative.
If you can figure out who to contact, you can probably get a sample for the museum legally. Maybe a geologist at your university knows a geologist in Hawaii who can help, or you could visit the state of Hawaii web page and see if the government has a department of natural resources or parks or a state geological survey organisation that can help you obtain a sample for the museum..
There is a beach on Long Island, about 50 miles east of New York City that has wide swaths of red garnet sand, much of which can be pebble sized. There are also patches of barking sand there. I have found large chunks of red jasper puddingstone and other glacial erratics also, being that the entire island is one big terminal moraine.
I have been there, cool place but it really only has a slight green hue, mostly sandy color with slightly green hint. You can see the crystals intermixed with sand in pretty high quantity. Beautiful place and worth the trip but if are expecting emerald glowing green, you'll be disappointed.
I've been lucky to visit the green sands beach two times in my life so far. Absolutely amazing to see in person! Bring lots of water and snacks! The locals will drive you to the beach for a small fee if you are pressed for time!
Before anyone decides they're going prospecting despite it not being allowed: I've been here and the green sand beach is just that: green sand. The olivine is small in particle size and very weathered. That said, aggregated together it makes an outstandingly beautiful location and one I'd recommend visiting. Do not expect any beach amenities (no bathrooms, no roads) and please try to take away more trash with you than you arrived with. The islands thank you 💚
I've been to the peridot beach in the Galapagos, and it is incredible. This one has the advantage of being able to land your zodiac (boat) right on the beach. Of course, you have to get to the Galapagos first, haha.
Oh man, we missed this spot on our trip ! I think I remember seeing it on the map. We even went to the southern tip mentioned here. We stayed solely on this side of the island, for the volcanoes. We saw the black sand beach though. Thanks for the video.
I got to visit the Big I for a year & checked out all the different colored sand beaches... One of the places I stayed in Ocean View had it all over the ground as well...
I was at Hanauma Bay Hawaii many times when i was a tween in the early 80s. I was a kid but I definitely remember that there was a portion of the beach that had high concentrations of pyrite. I believe it was the southern portion of the beach.
I did my study abroad for a year in Hawaii. These peridot gemstone sands can also be found on the shore of Dimond Head on O'ahu. Admittedly, these are in less abundance than the Pakakolea site but it is far easier to access given its proximity to the Honolulu front. Word of warning for any visitors, it is also home to a gay nudist community so you may be approached (as I was) while studying the geology.
Gold Beach, Oregon is a mix of density sorted agate, quartz, and yes, gold flakes. ^-^ After different kinds of storms, the gold sand will be striped with black, dense minerals before another storm mixes it up again.
Thanks for reminding people not to take the sand. It is a problem for us in Hawai'i and I assume any tourist destination that involves nature. The other big problem is tourist not staying away from the wildlife. From Nene birds, monk seals and honu on the beach. Don't go near them, just stay back and observe. They're all protected species.
How in heck are they going to enforce not collecting the crystals when, like sand, they're going to get into everything - shoes, socks, towels, butt cracks ...
Too many tourists have suffered from kapu of taking any Hawaiian specimen with bad luck and other psychic trauma- They send the item back and beg Madame Pele's forgiveness!
My niece goes to south point to fish all the time, so lots of locals are there. You have to park and walk so sneaking any sand back to a car isn't easy. And boy a person will get some major scoldings if any of us locals catch them doing it. It's for all to see, not for one to have.
@@aldebaran4154 Again, how in heck is one expected to not track particles back as with any other sand at any other beach? Does one have to pass through a Wildfire type disinfection system before leaving?
Note… There are more than four green sand beaches on the island of Hawaii alone, not just the world. The amount of olivine varies from beach to beach, but Papakolea is not the top of the list for olivine, probably second.
We tried hiking to the Green sand beach once but never made it all the way. We actually ended up stopping at a small little Bay that had tons of green sand as well. It was probably right over the ridge then from the main beach
There are a few black sand beaches in Malaysia, which are slowly being eroded by the oceans. Any chance of covering that as well? Or the quartz ridge that partially surrounds one half of Klang Valley, within Peninsular Malaysia, that’s said to be the longest known in the world. Or the “odd volcanoes” in Sabah, which is still relatively unknown to most of us here (besides the few known active mud volcanoes within the same state)? Would be nice if you could cover those topics in future videos, because these are something worth explaining, as there’s hardly any info on that over here. The black sands beaches somehow has volcanic origins, I was told. But the two known ones are located at two locations within the Peninsular, that’s far away from the state that had the volcanoes though.
if you are looking for a beach whose sand is unusual to say the least; the case of a certain black sand beach in the town of Guapari in Brazil (20° 39′ 28″ S, 40° 30′ 39″ W) should interest you (and I will be interested in your analysis) the black sand of these particular beaches is distinguished from other black sand beaches by a significant concentration of thorium (natural thorium being slightly radioactive, the standard geology hammer will be effectively supplemented by a small Geiger detector)
I've seen gravity sorting like this in person on some of lake Michigan's south western shores, but with iron minerals instead forming impressive black/purple/red sands. Climate change has prevented the lake from freezing over as it used to resulting in winter storms eroding the dunes at an alarming rate. Unsurprisingly, erosion moves lighter quartz grains much faster than the iron minerals.
If you want to find better bigger crystals in the sand, they can be found on beaches just a bit to the south, better sorted, larger grains. Papakōlea beach sand is much finer and has lower peridot proportion than other spots. In person it is not nearly as green as it looks in pictures.
Olivine is very unstable to erosion and chemical weathering when it is in the presence of water. Of course it takes tens of thousands of years for it to chemically weather, so relatively young islands such as Hawaii can contain large amounts of it right on the surface.
I'd love to see a video on the tectonic activity and volcanism of Io. I'm curious of whay your knowledge of that moon is, especially with it's many supervolcanoes, with eruptive materials reaching orbit.
If you live in an area that was overrun by continental glaciers, and look closely at a pinch of sand on the shore of a lake, you'll find it often has dozens of different colors and type of sand grains.
so theoretically there could be a diamond beach an emerald beach a ruby beach a citron beach a platinum beach a quartz crystal beach that sounds like be painful to walk on.
Lots of geological mapping has happened around salt domes and other carbon traps. Has equivalent geology been done to map out ancien beach lines and intertidal coasts? Thus potential traps for denser than sand deposits of various kinds, by the ton?
I would be interested in a video about the Intermountain Seismic Zone, which causes earthquakes all the way from Utah into northwest Montana. Is it related to the Yellowstone supervolcano?
Question.. if one were to scoop up a few hand fulls if the peridot "sand" and melt in a crucible.. when cools off,, wouldn't that equal a giant peridot crystal?
b,c. prospector who has the youtube channel Dan Hurd Prospecting, did a video of this beach at the beach a few years ago. cool place, i want to go see it, i have a kid who was born in august, maybe they should go.
On the West coast of the North Island of New Zealand, there are many beautiful sparkly black sand beaches. Known as ironsand, it is magnetic, fine-grained, and gets everywhere. It is rich in titanomagnetite and is even mined in a few places. Just don't drop a cellphone or portable speaker there. Anyway, don't take speakers to beaches at all, nobody wants to hear them. 😀
3:28 Accessing the site via parking lot and a hike of several kilometers. Okay. 🙄 3:41 There's a car above the beach in the background. Fine, so perhaps a hike isn't needed. 😁 Nice video, thank you 👋🏻👴🏼
US National Parks are similarly protected by law enforcement personnel. Penalties for taking stuff from future tourists can result in fines and jail time. But carrying pork is legal even though ancestors may disagree.
Geology Hub Man, This Is My Request For Tomorrow's Video. Please If Not Too Much Trouble, Do A Video On Authurs Seat In Edinburgh, Scotland, And Please Go Over Its Geologic History, And Some Of Its Most Powerful Eruption's That It Produced. Thanks If You Do Actually Do My Video Request, And Please Do It Tomorrow. Thanks Again If You Do.
Born n raised on Oahu, I got to fly in Civil Air Patrol single engine DeHavilland Beavers n L-19s with pops to all the outer islands except Ni'ihau n Kaho'olawe. I got to walk on almost pure Olivine sand of the original "Green Sand Beach'' on the NE side up Hilo way. My brother n I, me 5th grade n he 6th grade - swam close to shore over an a'a lava field covered in sea growth n sea weed. It is now an a'a lava field with an ultra jagged rock coastline.