White Sands of the Emerald Coast EarthCache
White Sands of the Emerald Coast
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Navarre Beach Park is managed by the county of Santa Rosa. It is located at the extreme south end of the county on a barrier island. The GZ is located on boardwalk where a wheelchair can access the site. Elevation of site is approx. 15 ft.
White Sands of the Emerald Coast
The Emerald Coast, a portion of the Red Neck Riviera and years ago known as the Miracle Strip is an area in the southeastern United States on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, roughly bounded by Pensacola, Florida on the west and Panama City, Florida on the east.
The area is known to have some of the most stunning beaches in the world, famous for their sugar white sands and warm, emerald-green waters. For many years, the beaches were deemed to have the whitest sand in the world where it sparkled in the sunshine and squeaked when walked on.
A popular misconception among tourist and even many locals is that the sand is bleached by the sun. This sand, in the truest sense of the word, is not sand at all but Appalachian Quartz that filtered it's way down to the coast from the Appalachian mountains 20,000 years after the last ice age, when the glaciers melted.
That sand dune you are looking at today was perhaps once, thousands of years ago, a mountain top near the Georgia-South Carolina border.
Sediment reaching the Gulf along the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, and Mississippi coasts is almost entirely from erosion of hard rocks in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Quartz, a hard, durable mineral, survives transport by fast-moving streams, while softer minerals break down and dissolve, or remain suspended in the water. Sedimentary particles available for deposition along the northeastern Gulf Coast are thus pure white quartz.
Fast moving streams bring mostly grains of clear white quartz the short distance across the coastal plain to the Gulf of Mexico where it was moved by powerful alongshore currents westward. These currents gradually deposited the quartz on thin ridges of sediment on the shallow sea floor leaving the white crystals to pile up and eventually form our beautiful beaches and barrier islands. Navarre Beach (coordinates of the cache) is located on a barrier island that stretches from Fort Pickens to the west and Destin to the east.
To the west and east the sedimentary supply is quite different. The Mississippi River system drains an enormous portion of the North American continent, through slow-moving streams that bring in a lot of mud and silt, in addition to sand. Beaches of Louisiana and east Texas are therefore a "chocolate brown" color. Along the west coast of Florida streams bring in dissolved limestone from the peninsula, but very little sand, silt, or mud. The material deposited is mostly fragments of seashells; the beaches are white, but not nearly as sparkling as those of the Emerald Coast!
One of the most stunning aspects of the quartz other then its whiteness is the fact that it along with the sun causes our waters to be emerald in color, thus the name Emerald Coast.
A few good web sites to learn more...
www.nps.gov/guis/extended/MIS/MNature/Geology.html
www.tripsmarter.com/.../6178-gulf-waters-brown.html
To log this smiley, at the posted coordinates you must -
1.Take your picture in front of the sand dunes and beach toward the east, holding your GPS. Post the picture with the logging of the cache.
2. Take a close look at the "sand" and the Gulf.
A) What does the "sand" look like up close?
B) The Gulf can be many colors depending on the weather, time of day or wave action. Please describe the color of the water and your suspected reason for it being such.
Email your answers to; starrett1700@hotmail.com
FTF ---- Gelugon 11/18/2009
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