The Soft Sands of Namibia
Close Up Sand Crystals
Here’re some really beautiful photos of what sand looks like when you get really really close! Follow this link!
Daily Photo – The Soft Sands of Namibia
It’s hard to believe that the myriad of colors above, en masse, results in this. I wonder why the resulting color is often light yellow/tan. I suppose, putting on my color-mixing hat, that when you mix together a lot of red/green/blue and clear/shiny/white that you end up with this color. When you mix all those paints together you get black, and when you mix all that light together you get white.
But sand has properties of both paint and light because it both absorbs, reflects, and refracts light. So, then, my color-mixing-hat says sand should be somewhere between black and white, so a gray. But sand isn’t gray… then, peering deep into the hat, it makes sense that there are not many Blue crystals, since that’s the least common rock color, giving the Red and Green a higher relative count, whose reflective light mixes into a Yellow color. And then mixing a Yellow with Grey results in the typical “sand” color.
