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The sand here
on the Emerald Coast is among the whitest, cleanest and softest in the
world. What you might not know, is that when you walk on the beaches here,
you are actually walking on the mountains - the Appalachian Mountains,
that is.
The sand on the Emerald
Coast beaches is comprised mainly of quartz washed down from the mountains
by the Apalachicola River, 130 miles east of Ft. Walton Beach. It is this
quartz, ground to a perfect oval in each grain of sand, that makes the
beach "squeak" when you walk on it.
Normally, such quartz has a
rosy pink tint because of it's iron oxide coating, but the sugary-white
quartz of the Emerald Coast lost it's coating somewhere along it's watery
journey thousands of years ago. No one knows exactly how or why. |
