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Question of Marc (01.30.2023): How many grains of sand are there on earth?
R:
7.5 trillion grains of sand on Earth, can you believe it?
That's the incredible discovery of Professor Howard C. McAllister of the University of Hawaii. He established this number by using a complex mathematical formula based on kilometers of shoreline, beach depths and average sand grain size.
But Eric Chaumillon, a researcher at the University of La Rochelle, has a different estimate - 200 billion billion billion grains of sand.
How exactly did they make their calculation?
- The first started from the principle that there were 200,000 km of shoreline in the world and that a quarter of them were covered with sand, that the beaches were on average 30 meters long and 5 meters deep, based on a volume of 1mm3 occupied for 1 grain of sand. That is 7 500 000 000 000 000 000 grains of sand (7.5 x 10^18)
- The second one is based on the total volume of sand representing 1% of the Earth's crust, which is itself 1% of the volume of the Earth. That is 200 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 grains of sand (2 x 10^26).
This second calculation is also true because the first one does not take into account deserts such as the Sahara. The latter is the largest non-polar desert in the world and covers more than 9,000,000 km˛ of North Africa, but most of its surface is a hamada or rocky plateau. The dune fields of the Sahara cover only about 15% of the total desert surface...
What is the real number? That's for you to decide. The world is full of fascinating mathematical puzzles that leave us speechless.
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