Quote:
How many grains of it do you think line the beaches
your question is not well defined.
what does it mean to "line" a beach? are you talking about the single grains of sand that outline the perimeter of a beach? when you say "beaches" how many beaches are you talking about?
i will only address how many grains (roughly) of sand i think are contained in an average beach.
the average beach i think is about 2 km long and 100 meters wide.
i imagine the depth of the sand to be about 3 meters at the place where the beach meets the grass, and about 1 meter where the beach meets the waterline, so will say the average depth of the sand is 2 meters.
the average grain of sand is a cube about 1/2 millimeter wide and high and deep.
that makes the grain of sand's volume 1/8 millimeter cube.
there are a billion cubic millimeters in a cubic meter.
so a beach 2 km long and 100 meters wide and 2 meters deep has a volume of 400,000 cubic meters.
if you divide 400,000 by 1/8,000,000,000 you get 3,200,000,000,000,000 (3 quadrillion, 200 trillion) grains.
i would think most beaches in the world would range between 1 and 20 quadrillion grains of sand.
something that astounded me was that i once read in an article from hawaii university that said there were about 5.7 quintillion grains of sand in all the world's beaches. that would mean that the the amount of "tons" the world weighs is about 1,000 times more than every grain of sand on it's beaches.
but now i have done my own calculation of a single beach for this thread, i think that the university of hawaii is wrong. if my example beach contains 3.2 quadrillion grains, then 5.7 quintillion grains means there are only about 1780 average beaches in the world which i would think is not correct.
the amount of stars in our galaxy, if they were represented by grains of sand, would fill a box 4.16666 meters high and wide and deep.