The word “sand”, like the words “rock” and “dirt”, is a word that one acquires very early in childhood. Sand, rock, and soil are ubiquitous materials, the building blocks of our planet. We meet them early in life and life requires us to know what they are.
Perhaps the most interesting of the three for young people is sand because it is hard and yet can flow like water, it is hard and soft, static but mobile. Sand, say the encyclopedias, is a “natural granular material composed of rock and finely divided mineral particles.” Even those who have not studied sand know that it comes in a variety of colors and initial degrees of granularity, ranging from the talcum powder fineness of the orange sand of the Sahara to the much grittier varieties derived from crushed coral that They are so prevalent on the world’s beaches.
And now at last comes a book dedicated exclusively to sand, an extraordinary and delicious exploration of this strange corner of the mineral world. Is Arena: The Neverending Story by British geologist Michael Welland, a masterful evocation of a long-forgotten yet remarkable and pervasive basic substance of our world.
From individual grains seen in minute structural detail under the microscope to the vast desert dunes that form like ocean waves in stretches of the Sahara Desert that can be seen from space, from the bottom of the world’s oceans to the landscapes of our neighbor Mars, from billions of years in the past to a future stretching to infinity. Arena: The Neverending Story it’s an amazing narrative that spans the entire universe we live in, because pretty much everywhere in that universe is this stuff, this sand, one of the humblest and yet most powerful and pervasive materials in nature.
Although this is a book by a professional scientist with a Ph.D. from Cambridge, the story is told with a dramatic sense of language and narrative that is more reminiscent of fiction and film. Welland is a gifted writer. sand examines the science of sand, including the physics of granular materials in general, and yet the focus is always on the human context of sand, sand as a material we use every day. That, in the end, is what gives meaning to the arena in our human world. Interwoven with tales of scientists, sculptors, navigators, the story of sand is at once a story of environmental construction and a story of environmental collapse, an adventure that goes back to the beginnings of our planet as a place of solid materials but a story that also encompasses the mundane realities of a child’s sandbox in today’s backyard. That’s because the sand is all around us. Sand is a component of almost everything: it has made possible our computers, buildings and window panes, toothpaste, cosmetics and paper, and has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce and imagination. It is a component of concrete and is an artifact of weathering. Given enough time, the Rocky Mountains will turn to sand; in fact, the Alleghenies already have. Welland shows us that we can find the world in a grain of sand.
Although he is undoubtedly a professional scientist first and foremost, no one is more fun to listen to as a writer of narrative nonfiction than Michael Welland. he is born storyteller who could easily have become a pulp fiction writer (or a British pub owner!) had he not chosen the higher calling of studying rocks. His narrative flows with the ease and grace of the best creative nonfiction, adapting many of the storytelling techniques more typically associated with novels.
His fellow scientists have recognized the power of this book.. Arena: The Neverending Story it won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal in 2010 for that year’s best book on natural history (an honor Welland shares with Rachel Carson, Joseph Wood Krutch, John McPhee, and other natural history luminaries dating back to 1926).
Michael Welland has written an extraordinary book, perhaps even a timeless book that non-scientists can enjoy as much as professional geologists. Welland, who spent many years practicing geology in the United States, now lives in London with his wife and his family, where he is CEO of Orogen, a geological consulting firm he founded, and a member of the Geological Society. .
Arena: The Neverending Story360 pages, is available in hardcover and paperback from The University of California Press.