In a 2017 magazine article in The New Yorker titled “The World Is Running Out of Sand” author David Owen writes about a beach volleyball event on Lake Ontario that had to ship 1,300 tons of sand in 35 tractor trailer loads from a quarry 2-1/2 hours away in order to maintain world volleyball federation consistency standards (despite the large lakefront beach nearby).
Suffice to say, not all sand is created equal, which is apparently why people are killing each other, literally, over sand. “A South African entrepreneur shot dead in September. Two Indian villagers killed in a gun battle in August. A Mexican environmental activist murdered in June,” writes Vince Beiser in a 2019 BBC feature titled “Why The World Is Running Out Of Sand.”
Next to water, sand is the most-consumed natural resource on the planet and is used for all matter of construction, from concrete to cellphones. “The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand,” writes Beiser, adding how even silicon chips in phones and computers are made from just the right sand.
With nearly a million square miles of desert, you’d think the Arabian Peninsula would have the global sand market cornered. However, desert sand isn’t very good for making concrete or beach volleyball courts; the wind-formed grains are too round and too smooth to bind properly. In fact, the city of Dubai actually imports production sand from Australia, prompting Beiser to joke how Australians are literally selling sand to Arabs!
Sand is a global commodity, and it seems that none is finer than the angular water-formed grains found off the Jersey Coast. Tens of thousands of years in the making, tumbled and shifted, flowing from rivers through inlets and ultimately captured by glacial lumps, many ocean grains of sand are so coveted that criminal gangs involved in black market sand activities are apparently stripping beaches bare worldwide.
Dredges and pipes have been strewn along New Jersey beaches all winter, the world’s finest sand being plucked from nearshore lumps and ridges for replenishing local beaches, just in time for summer. Yet while we’re dealing with the continued borrowing of sand being brought ashore by the Army Corps of Engineers, the folks at the Bureau of Ocean & Energy Management (BOEM) are also now eyeing these same coastal sand ridges as profit-generators. A relatively new government agency, BOEM launched in 2011 with a stated mission to “manage development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.”
In a nutshell, BOEM’s primary function is leasing offshore mineral and energy resources, and now these federal ocean landlords at BOEM – the same agency responsible hundreds of thousands of acres of seafloor being leased to industrial wind developers – are funding research by Rutgers University to study one particular sand ridge near Brigantine Shoal. To gain a better understanding of its role as fish habitat, Rutgers researchers are using bottom trawl, fish tagging, and side-scan sonar methods to study how bottom features across the ridge change over time, and the ways that fish associate with them; the fact that Rutgers is shepherding this research is good news!
Fishermen typically despise beach replenishment, but it’s really a necessary evil. Once development of barrier islands first began centuries ago, there was no turning back on the protection of inhabited coastal cities and towns. While surfcasters are immediately impacted by beach replenishment, it’s important to remember that we also lose essential nearshore fish habitat which could potentially impact all nearshore fishing for generations to come.
Since BOEM drives revenue for the federal government through leases, I doubt they’re on the DOGE filet table. Hopefully, the good folks at Rutgers can help prove the essentialness of these sand ridges for the health of our marine ecosystems and coastal fisheries.
