If sand comes from the ocean, how come there's so much in the desert where there is no water?

Answer 1

Sand comes from the weathering of rock. Not just the ocean.

Answer 2

Many places on earth are very different now than they were a long time ago, and that accounts for much of the differences you see. But sand does not only come from the ocean. It comes from wherever stones get ground together until they are little bits, and that can happen by the action of water or of wind. The largest deserts are those where nothing much has grown there for so long that the wind is not halted, and the grains of sand and larger stones are blown around, roll over each other, and break each other up. Some may have been the bottoms of oceans long ago, or of shallow lakes or other bodies of water, but some have gradually dried out when vegetation was removed. It is speculated that much of northern Africa was once grass and trees, but the trees were used for wood to build ships and for firewood, and the grass was not sufficient to hold the moisture without the trees, so it dried up too, and what is left is sand because the more moist soil we are used to cannot build up without vegetable matter going into the mix.

Answer 3

The sands that you see on the beach are from the ocean. However, the sands in the desert aren't from ocean at all; instead, they are made by the process of desertification. Desertification is a process that can weather and erode stones, grounds, rocks, minterals....etc into sands, and that's how the sands in deserts come from. By the way, desertification is a bad thing that created by humans ourselves; at the beginning, people cut down trees as a natural resources to us, the problems, humans cut trees from almost everywhere. Trees can protect the ground and the things around and underneath it so the ground will be stablized. However, once the trees are gone, the disaster also stars as well.

Answer 4

You may find sand in the ocean, but it does not form there.

Sand forms from weathering of rocks such as granite, or is recycled from sandstone. Considerable amounts of sand form in mountainous terrains by mechanical and chemical weathering of rock, and is carried by water and wind to lower elevations, such as deserts and oceans.

Sand does NOT form from soil. Some soil just happens to contain sand. When a soil drys out, the smaller parts of it will blow away, leaving larger sand grains behind.

Many deserts have NEVER been oceans, but some like the Sahara were once underwater.

MOST sand does not come from weathered sandstone. Again, in the case of the Sahara, much of it did get recycled from sandstone that was once deposited in the ocean, but all of it originally came from the mountain ranges that border the Sahara.

Answer 5

Sand is formed by water, wind and erosion. It is not just isolated in creation to the ocean.
But you must remember that over 90% of this planet was water at it very earliest stages.
So as the wind blew, volcanoes erupted, water receeded, glaciers eroded, sand was formed.
Sand accumulates in the deserts because of their arid environment.
Even a giant bolder can become sand if the element act on it long enough. Look at what is happening to the sphynx in Egypt.

Answer 6

Sand comes from eroded sandstone. Some of it is in the ocean, some on land. Very often, it is the land based sand that gets blown or washed to the shore to form a beach.

Answer 7

Sand is created from the erosion of rock not from oceans. Though it may have been an ocean floor at one time in history.

Answer 8

At one time the deserts were the ocean bottoms

Answer 9

sand is derived from quartz(silica)...as time passes sedimentary rocks get eroded and wear down leaving behind the tiny particles..
sand is refer to the grain or particles whose grain size is more then 64mm or so...
there fore what ever we see on the see shore and in the deserts its the same but the difference is in there origin and size

Answer 10

Most deserts used to be oceans millions of years ago. Sometimes seashells, etc are found in deserts.