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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ต.ค. 2024
- I never thought of sand as a non-renewable resource, but there's only a limited supply: and to make things worse, it keeps getting washed into the sea. At Cape May, New Jersey, the US Army Corps of Engineers have just finished rebuilding a beach: here's why.
Thanks to the folks from the Corps for showing me around!
There's more about their project here: www.nap.usace.a...
🟥 MORE FROM TOM: www.tomscott.com/
(you can find contact details and social links there too)
📰 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER with good stuff from the rest of the internet: www.tomscott.c...
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CAMERA AND DRONE OP: Osprey Perspectives, www.ospreypersp...
EDITOR: Michelle Martin, @mrsmmartin
And thanks to Elmo Keep for linking to the article that inspired this video!
REFERENCES:
Leatherman, S., Zhang, K. and Douglas, B. (2000).
Sea level rise shown to drive coastal erosion.
Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 81(6), p.55.
Peduzzi, P. (2014). Sand, rarer than one thinks.
Environmental Development / United Nations
Environmental Program, 11, pp.208-218. : www.unep.org/pd...
Zhang, G., Song, J., Yang, J. and Liu, X. (2006).
Performance of mortar and concrete made with a fine aggregate
of desert sand. Building and Environment, 41(11), pp.1478-1481.
Beiser, V. (2015). The Deadly Global War for Sand. Wired. www.wired.com/...
Beiser, V. (2016). The World’s Disappearing Sand. The New York Times. www.nytimes.co...
![โรงเรียนดัดสันดาน นักเรียนเถื่อน..!! [โรงเรียนไดเม่]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vRKPeXn4Fl4/mqdefault.jpg)
Pull down the description for links, references, and details on this one - and thanks again to all the folks who went out of their way to make this happen!
Tom Scott I love your videos
Tom Scott will do Tom
Tom Scott Thanks for another great video!
i love your videos
+Tom Scott I remember seeing them doing work similar to this on the beaches in Long Beach Island, where I go on vacation with my family. IIRC it was because Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of beach erosion so they needed to rebuild dunes. Now I understand what they were doing and why they were doing it!
Love your stuff, btw!
Sand mafia? Damn, reality really is stranger than fiction.
He who controls the spice controls the universe.
Chowder T the place where I live, they are in newspapers once a week!
Lordious reminds me of india
They leave you sleeping with the fishes.
Roondar Murnig no it’s he who controls the doors control space
Sand used to be a renewable resource, but then Mojang patched the sand duplication bug.
s6thgaming lmao 👌
s6thgaming No, you can still do it. It's harder now though
Just use an end portal, duh.
built a 16*16 nether portal on the nearest beach to a village and it's the largest nether portal I have made
@the last thing you'll ever see there is no blackstone sand
it seems that the only thing that we aren't running out of is problems
We're not running out of people! That's probably why we have so many problems, though...
After 2100 when fertility rate, globally, will be less than 2, we'll be running out of that as well.
And every solution creates more problems than the one it solves.
We're running out of creative solutions that they will pay for
U can say that again..
Good, I'm glad!! I hate sand, its coarse and it's rough and it gets everywhere!!
Same,Anakin,Same.
same
Anakin Skywalker but still, there are many high grounds on earth
How do you feel about obi-wan sending Luke to a sandy planet.
@@simplepotato24 Bro. It's a star wars joke. Look at his name xD
I swear 90% of our missing sand is in casual beach goer's cars.
Or in tourist arses.
Lewis Conroy I've heard the Maldives actually disallow the export of sand even at a tourist rate...
The next thing you know, people would start to salvage cars, dirty towels and slippers for sand
goers'*
My mother used to take home a metric shitload of sand from every other beach vacation
Excellent topic
You make a video about this
sand-astic !
Im here to let u know that ur comment is having 444 likes after 4 years. Niceee
@@noice131 one year later and it is now 555 likes.
It's called Lies.
Anakin will be thrilled.
You sir, win the best comment I've seen all day.
+Chakorn Shipp It's coarse... It's rough... And it gets everywhere...
Chakorn Shipp 😂
xD
UltimateGeek its course and rough, and it grts everywhere
In Cape May, where this video was filmed, right next door is a bird observatory, in fact where those lakes are inland harbor thousands ofbirds during migration season. That sand is CRUCIAL to migrating bird species such as pipers and plovers and some sections of that specific beach are closed to nesting in some parts of the year. Also that bunker in the background is a wwii submarine outpost
I can’t believe he walked right in front of that bunker and didn’t even acknowledge it! It drove me crazy!
It seems with every new video, the quality and production value goes up!
Yeah, but every Video before that makes it seem like it would be impossible.
*Tom Scott, but every time he makes a video the production value and quality go up*
I agree, this one reminded me a lot of his Field Day episode with all the nice drone shots and editing.
He's got an editor now, Michelle Martin, @mrsmmartin. I suppose that helps.
Josef Hornych delicious maymays.
Cause ad rev. Don't worry I use adblock
Don't worry I am only one person
This is where the fun begins.
1. Stop building sandboxes for children
2. No child will ever think about becoming an architect
3. No building needed
4. More sand!
Domen Bremec but we will need to do a lot of building when suburbia becomes obsolete at $500 a barrel oil.
Interestingly (or maybe not), the sand used in sandboxes is the same type as beach sand, because it sticks together - but the sand used in the pits around playground equipment, to break kids' falls, is a different type, exactly because it doesn't stick together.
flodnak We had grass around the playground and now they have tartan around it... never saw actual sand in their place
flawless logic
It only sticks because little Mike always pees into it :-)
the production quality on this one was amazing
Cool
@@ronitreddy9623 cool
@@JuhooniSwahooni cool
@@ronitreddy9623 cool
@@bobbycraig2583 not cool
I live about an hour north up the coast from here, and have been watching this happen for years. The dredging process is incredible, but it’s even more incredible just how much the beach changes in only a few years.
so what you're saying is that the next trillion dollar worthy Nobel price is a way to use desert and sea sand for construction?
In all seriousness, yes. But remember that capitalism will play a part too: it can't just be a way to use desert sand, it's got to make using desert sand cheaper than the alternatives!
Glass houses covered by solar panels...
+Rok Adamlje So no stone throwing in the future, noted.
that or a more efficient ways to store energy I guess, a lot of renewable sources of energy aren't constant and we are getting more and more objects that require portable energy (smartphone but more importantly for the future electric cars) we really could improve things a lot with batteries that recharge faster and have more capacity
Just mix it with that cheap arse breakfast cereal they try to feed you in hotels.
Somewhere in the distance, you can here Anakin say "Yippie"
Yippie!
We're gonna build a beach, and make the fish pay for it. We have the best sand.
Stelum -Your comment wins the Internet today. Well played, well played...
Stelum :') hahahaha
We're gonna build sand and make the beach pay for it. Believe me, it's going to work. 100%.
Stelum
*Extensive arm movement and rotation*
Stelum 😂😂😂😂
these videos are actually helping me write better...
whenever I get stuck, I just ask myself what Tom Scott would do
Depending on what version of the world you run... I hear you can duplicate sand with pistons. :)
Halosty A stack of likes... well done.
That… actually gives me an idea on how you can coarsen fine desert and sea sand into sizes and shapes that might be more useable…
Just crush cobble a bit
Oh. That explains quite a bit. I vacationed there two years ago and every day I took a walking path next to the beach and noticed that construction vehicles were just moving sand around. I've always wondered "why the hell would they do that?".
So we're running out of:
• Sand
• Rare-Earth metals (and the common ones)
• Hydrocarbons/fossil-fuels (not such a bad thing)
• New land to build on
• Fertile land (only gonna get worse with time)
Among others... Does anyone else feel like we're heading towards a global version of Easter Island?
So we are gonna end up making huge head sculptures out of rocks and leave em scattered across the world... Maybe thats what insanity feels like.
we're running out of everything technically. Most of those things wont be a real problem for a long time and as with many other things people thought would be terrible, new technologies arise to solve problems.
Superdavo0001 I think the rare earth thing is mostly a "China has cornered the market" thing - plus environmental concerns making mining harder and more expensive in the west.
Oh and in your "running out of space to build stuff" - marginal settlements at the edge of comfortable human habitation (e.g. in the high Alps) are actually given up at a faster rate than created anew ever since industrialization started.
And most of the land we pave over is paved to run or park cars on it
To be fair, mount rushmore, lady liberty and alot of other big statues are already scattered across the world
Most important AND overlooked is that we will run out of phosphorus in about 87 years. Phosphorus is used as fertilizer and can only be mined. When we can't mine more phosphorus we will only be able to feed 1 billion people.
It's a very common thing in Germany too!
We have islands where towns were built at the very east and are now located in the middle of the island.
Sylt is probably the best example for the same sand pumping technique to protect the shoreline.
"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." -- Anakin Skywalker
Connor was that scene bad writing bad delivery by the actor or both?
Jesus Gonzalez both
Bad writing from George Lucas. How is nobody in the comments making Dune jokes?
Somebody Else Had My Joke
Jesus Gonzalez the line was i dont like sand how you can deliver that badly
I’ve been there so many times at that fort, I remember going to cape May during the period they were rebuilding and then coming during the summer and seeing how changed it was
Wow, I never though this will happen!
In Thailand, we use a huge amount of sandbags to fill in the beach. And some case, especially with the rock barrier in the sea, make the beach shorter than it should be due to stronger water current.
I don't think pumping sand back to the beach is the good choice for long term. But it maybe the best way to do for now.
Another cool video Tom. I'll translate this to Thai as always.
the missing sand offshore will just be taken from the beach back into the hole they took sand from.
“You come to me on my daughter’s wedding day, and you don’t even bother to bring me any sand”
Imagine the day when building a sandcastle becomes a luxury only accessible to the wealthy... dark times
Well dark times a long way out hopefully.
But one question: Can't you recycle concrete? And if so shouldn't we then at some point in the future have the situation where recycling is simply cheaper than getting new sand?
Scorpionsnerd I think concrete is already being recycled but unless you mix new sand in, the quality gets worse
ofcourse we should be able to recycle it at some point, its just in no way economically viable. everything we are "running out of" isn't actually gone, just in a different form or extremely diluted. the problem is that its very expensive extracting that again, its fighting against entropy.
tjeulink well obviously pretty much everything can be recycled. so when I asked if concrete can be recycled my question was exactly about feasibility and cost as well as how resource intensive it is...
tjeulink as I said above, you can crush old concrete and mix it in (they used to do similar things with slag) but if you exceed a certain percentage quality suffers
+Scorpionsnerd That day is now. The "folks" whose mansions are being "protected" by the Corps of Engineers are all members of the 1%. Not one mention in the vid about the Cape May Canal. Those beaches that are being protected are all artificial. They were produced from the sand dredged when the Corps excavated the Cape May Canal. The majority of beach erosion is not from rising oceans but from diverted sand. Natural sand deposits have been diverted from normal deposition by the many Corps projects to "protect" beaches and enhance navigation.
As for the world running out of sand, it's not going off-planet. The Earth gains hundreds of tons of additional material each year from cosmic dust deposition. Until the pirates get ships capable of reaching orbit the sand stays on Earth. It just moves around, like it always has ...
IMO if New Jersey was serious about protecting its people, it would insist that at least part of the hundred of millions spent each year on beach creation go into protective seawalls instead (which the beachfront owners don't want.)
"I hate sand it's course, rough and it gets everywhere"
general misquoti
It's a pain when it gets in my Vaseline
For the flip side of things:
"I like sand. Sand is squishy."
Is it.... from Star Wars?
coarse*
Wow. I love your videos because I learn something new every time. They are short, but informative. I never even thought about running out of sand. It has never even crossed my mind. Thank you for bringing attention to things we never think about. These videos are addictive!!
@Tom Scott: Wildwood, just a short jaunt north of Cape May, has the opposite problem! The beach over there continues to grow!! ...so much so that the old "fishing" pier no longer even reaches the ocean! That might be worth an episode as well, if you are ever back in that area!
Give Tom Scott his own TV show.
nobody watches tv
They were doing this down the coast from us when I went to the beach in North Carolina. The equipment is massive and it’s interesting to watch.
The camera work on this one is incredible, Tom. Was this video filmed using drone?
This has TV levels of professionalism to it. Well done, Tom! Great video!
says in the desc. that camera and drone op was done by Osprey Persepectives
And this helped Anakin recover from his post-Tatooine flashbacks
If you play the video then press 0 non stop you have Tom tap dancing.
You're welcome.
Press 9 for a different dance move :)
**claps**
That's fantastic, good work
Press 3 repeatedly to hear some nice beats :)
If you press 9 you can make him clap
I've been to Cape May. I have fond memories of that place.
can we grind reality T.V. 'stars' into sand? they seem to be renewable
As a person from New Jersey. I watched the beaches erode away from the Sothern part ( I grew up in Atlantic City), I used to live in Brigantine NJ but had to move because the Island would had flooded multiple times.... then again I lived near the Bay inlet so i was kind of asking for it. I was hoping to learn something new, but its cool you covered this.
"Entire islands going missing-"
"Yo John, wasn't there an island out there?" *pushing wheel barrel* "Nah dude, totally just your imagination!"
the funny thing is the island just north of cape may wildwood is actually growing. its the most southern island in the new jersey barrier islands so all the sand that is eroded away from the islands above it accumulate in wildwood. and the island above it starts on 6th street because 1-5 have eroded away.
Ah yes, the sand mafia
Wilbur soot was right
Best explanation of beach replenishment or nourishment the residents of Cape May have had in a long while. Not sure the motivation of this production but I am glad to have found it.
Sand mafia?
Damn Wilbur wasn’t lying
I love how your videos such a professional vibe with like showing your sources as you use them and theres no fluff just straight to the point information
Damnit tom, you past right by me. You just sneak in and around places of the world like a ninja, with no chance at anybody catching you. You strip tease.
passed*
I live near OC, and I visited Cape May Point regularly before corona!
I work in a gas station in Dunedin, NZ, and you could imagine my surprise when we walked in one night after finishing filming of his Baldwin St video!
I love Tom's videos because they introduce me to topics I haven't really given thought to before.
Anikan:This a happy moment,the happiest moment of my life
Hi Tom, interesting bit on beach renourishment in the UK: check out Dungeness beach and power station. Nuclear Power station build on a beach front that is drifting away rather quickly, they have pay an inordinate amount of money to move sand back around next to the power station to protect it every year.
Love the new reference bar on your video!!!
Normally the stories and places are completely new to me but knowing this story and having a beach house near here when I was younger made it even cooler to watch!
Never knew that the video that makes Anakin happy came from Tom Scott of all people
AY! Welcome to jersey. Cape May is beautiful.
As always - Liked before watching :)
And as always - Liked after watching
echsomat same
TheMinipasila you hit like again? A second time after watching? That's not good. Don't do that.
Nah I only like after I have watched any video.
+echsomat Don't cross the likes!
Tom, thanks for visiting my home state. Hopefully you enjoyed your visit to the garden state. Did you visit the pine barrens, the largest undeveloped patch of land between Boston and Washington DC, home of carniverous plants and cacti?
Anakin be like
This is a happy moment. The happiest moment of my life.
Only people that watch revenge of the Sith will know what it means
It fills me with so much joy when someone cites their sources.
Next do a video on phosphorus.It will run out in about 80 years and means we can't grow food anywhere near same amount as now.
Snufkin224 but can't you extract phosphorus from urine?
We can throw our poop and pee out on the fields, yes, but most end up in the ocean. Even organic farming needs mined phosphorus. As it is now the nutrient circle got some lose ends.
Snufkin224 I once read there is more gold in ocean water than all other known deposits combined. Only problem is: It's much too diluted
Well it all depends on the are in which the sewage is being treated. In some waste water plants. The water is recycled and if it is being used in an agricultural or irrigation purpose they keep the phosphorus and nitrogen in the water to act a fertiliser. Also in plants with nutrient remove the phosphorus is removed and the sludge is recycled as fertiliser. So there is some reuse, and since water is become more and more scarce or or becomes very economical to re use treated waste water. Wether it be for irrigation or indirect potabale reuse. Or it can be used to refill aquifers and reduce salt water intrusion. Either way the nutrients must be removed. And if it is being deposited into a lake or river they have to remove the phosphorus to prevent nutrient removal. You can also argue that the phosphorus going out in the ocean is being consumed by animals, microorganisms, algae, which allows it to move back up the food chain.
@@Snufkin224 If that is too inefficient, then can't they just make it in a lab?
The Roman Engineer Virtuvius spent one book of his great work, De Architectura, on obtaining good building materials, and a sizable portion of that was what types of sand were good for what types of construction and how to identify sandpits or beaches that would supply them.
The waves create new sand every second. It's a renewable resource.
The thing he said was it wasn't in an efficient way. He didn't say it was completely unrenewable, just that it would take an incredible amount of time to do and not in an efficient way.
epSos.de Technically fossil fuels are renewable it just takes 1000 years.
He also said that we can not use the non-beach sand in the construction, which is BS. He is telling a lot of things, not all of them are correct.
There are other resources that will become rare faster than the sand.
We can be relaxed about that. There are stone crushers that produce gravel at a thigh rate. Same can be done for sand too, if needed. Beach sand is just crushed stones and crushed shells of mollusks who produce them daily.
Not an issue at all.
The rising sea levels are more important.
It's pretty slow though.
I was suprised to see Tom in Cape May, close to home. I wonder why a foreigner would visit CM (even though it's nice) or even NJ in general.
the earth is slowly running out of oxygen, the earth is slowly running out of oil, the earth is slowly running out of metals, the earth is slowly running out of intellectual people
oxygen?
@globalko: Atmospherical leaking. Though not as much e.g. Helium, some Oxygen is still lost in space.
There is no significant amount of gases being released into the space. What do you mean by "....Oxygen is still lost in space.".?
No he's right, every time there is a bad solar storm it blows away a part of the upper atmosphere. Mind you this has been happening for billions of years with almost no effect. We'll never run out, 30% of the earth is made of oxygen it's just all trapped in the rocks
Trust me it's not a bad thing that the world is running out of fossil fuels like oil and coal.
Now travel a bit north to Wildwood, NJ where the beach just keeps getting longer and longer. As a kid the beach was a two minute walk to the ocean. Now, it's almost a 10 minute walk to the ocean.
Pack your things Padmé, We're going to Earth
I recall quite some time ago that Tom tweeted about having an idea for a video involving sand.
I've been waiting.
I was not disappointed.
Running out of sand??? Ha! What's next? Running out of oil & water?
Mera Mera
pffft what sadistic nerds.
_This is where the fun begins_
Anakin is probably getting hyped and is celebrating like crazy.
Go to the Netherlands, look at the "sand-engine" near The Hague beach. It is put in place to replenish the lost sand along the coast, it is there to disappear (but they will be rebuilding that one spot on a periodic basis) same principal
I can just imagine Anakin's ghost saying Yes to this video
I love how ever time the talk about the equipment Tom shows video of a farm tractor just chillin in the beach and the guy never even mentions tractors
Speaking as someone who used to work with aggregates: crusher plants can produce sand suitable for construction. Most of the sand where I work comes from crushers that turn big chunks of rock into gravel and sand. Said gravel and sand are used to make concrete and asphalt.
In Coastal Delaware, about 20 miles west of Cape May, we're stuck with the same thing. I know some people in the Watershed Stewardship division and it costs something like $4 million per year to restore the beach at Delaware Seashore State Park.
No-one who's played Minecraft should be surprised by this.
Fal Leithani amateurs. Just get out the end portal dupe and build skyscrapers to your hearts content
As the hills in Finland are out because enviroment laws the concrete makers had to find new source for the sand. Grinding rocks into sand using suitable metal grinders does that job but causes lots of noise. So all over the southern Finland in remote cites you see piles of sand. From visual clues one can see that each pile is made of different size of grains. And you only need to look and you see the machinery that does the job.
I hate sand.. it's rough and course and it gets everywhere ...
It's good to alert the public about the soon to be shortage of sand for construction, specially when you consider that ocean beach sand is not suitable for concrete mixing because of the salt content. The best sand is river bed sand and lake shore sand.
Anakin’s voice echoes: Finally!
I live in Gulf Shores and we haven't had a hurricane in a while thankfully but when we do have a hurricane the beaches disappear and this process is very important to restoring them. Thanks for doing a video on this one people don't realize how destructive a hurricane or bad storms can be on the beach.
that nature, its not our place to try and control it
Hey Tom, could you do A Things You Might Not Know video on why TV programmes have beeps when somebody swears? Why isn't it just silent, why does it have to be replaced with a beep? Thank you!
geminijets3242 At a guess people might think silence meant an intermittent audio problem somewhere.
With the recent storms in the coast in the East of Spain, the problems with the beach sand and the houses next to it just got even worse.
This title is a little misleading because sand is actually one of the few things that cant really be broken down by weathering due to the silicon oxygen tetrahedron. We are just slowly loosing track of where its all going.
I go to Wild Wood New Jersey for beach trips, it just above Cape May, while the Cape May beaches shrink each year, the Wild Wood beaches get larger every year
Awe, son of a beach. I knew it.
I am really happy that you adressed that topic.
Anakin skywalker: *happiness noises*
Fellow trooper. Sup
He's in Cape May!!! My favorite place in the world
I knew Anakin was behind this.
You were nearby me (I'm a little bit outside of Philadelphia). I vacationed at the Jersey shore my entire childhood. I remember when they were doing the dredging back in the 80s/90s.
I’m just here for the Anakin jokes
You have no idea how much I appreciate that you use citations.
i hate sand... its coarse and rough and it gets everywhere...
Just the sort of gritty groundbreaking journalism we've come to expect from Tom.
Anakin Skywalker would approve of this
I didn't even have the slightest clue that sand was a resource that was in high demand, thanks for sharing this Tom!
So this is what Wilbur soot watched
This is the most interesting thing I've seen in months. Your work is amazing! How do you hear about these things?
I don’t like sand, it’s coarse, rough, irritating and it gets everywhere!
Same
Are you still in NJ? It would be so cool to do something near Ewing, maybe something about the Trenton Mercer Airport, and do a meet and greet!
"Those sands aren't useful (...) for making concrete..' your source says otherwise
Zhang, G., Song, J., Yang, J. and Liu, X. (2006).
Performance of mortar and concrete made with a fine aggregate
of desert sand. Building and Environment, 41(11), pp.1478-1481.
'After adding CBC or CMS admixture, the
workability of the concrete improved, and the compressive
strength increased. It can be concluded that the
application of concrete with desert sand as a fine
aggregate in civil engineering is feasible.'
The paper does advise against the use of desert sand in mortar, however -- presumably because the necessary increase in cement to sand ratio in the mixture would make it less economically feasible.
Furthermore, the wording of the conclusion with regard to concrete is a little ambiguous. The workability improves and the compressive strength increased, but was that relative to the poor results found in for the mixture before the additive, or relative to standard concrete?
The two types of sand compared in the paper both seem to be desert sands.
tfw it's all because desert sand is slightly more expensive to process as concrete and no right minded capital earning business ownerwill ever consider such a foolish negligence when there's a perfectly good beach right over there
@@CakeZRqGoTR Well I mean, by the end of the day businesses do have to make money...
On many beaches, such as at Adelaide in South Australia, the reason why there is a shortage of sand is all the houses on the coastal dunes. The houses lock the sad in place and the is no natural reservoir to replenish the beaches. This has been a problem for years--rising sea levels just make it worse.