Single grain of sand, SEM

False-coloured scanning electron micrograph of a single grain of sand. The sand was collected from a beach on Jekyll Island on the Atlantic coast in Georgia, USA. Quartz or silica is a primary component of typical beach sand which forms when rock is weathered away (gradual wearing down of rock by e.g. temperature, wind, waves, rain, freezing and thawing, and the burrowing of plants and animals into cracks). Horizontal width of image is 250 micrometres.