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Beautiful Yet Strange: The Beach With Purple Sand In Canada

Beautiful yet strange: the beach with purple sand in Canada! Why is the sand here purple? Will the purple color of the sand remain throughout the year? Read our post to know the answer.

Remarkable Discovery – Beach With Purple Sand In Canada

Purple-Sand
Purple-Sand

In July 20118, Candice LaFaver and her family went on a summertime voyage on a freshwater lake in northern Saskatchewan. Then, she saw a secluded beach with purple grains of sand. It’s so beautiful that it makes her speechless.

LaFaver is actually a manager for this conserved landscape. According to her, she hadn’t seen that great scene in a long time. It was a thick stripe of colorful sand wrapping across the coastline like a ribbon on top of a gift.

The Purple Sands Beach

Beautiful-Beaches-In-Canada
Beautiful-Beaches-In-Canada

On this remote beach, the sand appears in a scale of vibrant shades. It could be lavender or magenta and even pink occasionally. Dazzling particles appear smeared down the coast like a painter’s brushstroke. They spread in clumps across rocks and splashed under the water.

Since its discovery, this secret beach has gained a reputation around the country because of its breathtaking geological feature.

The Reasons Behind Its Colorful Shades – Beach With Purple Sand In Canada

Purple-Garnet-Mineral
Purple-Garnet-Mineral

Though the sand looks like poetic imagery, there is a geological clarification behind it.

According to professor Kevin Ansdell, working at the University of Saskatchewan, all sands credit their shade to the rocks, minerals, and shells including their different particles. 

There are various shades of color when it comes to beaches around the world. And the most familiar is the usual white sands you’ve always seen. Those are generally caused by lots of round grains of quartz. For your information, quartz is the second-most typical mineral on Earth.

Nevertheless, white is not always the only shade to decorate a shoreline. For example, beaches in Hawaii and Iceland are usually black. This is because of the moody and dark tones of their volcanic lava rock.

There are also other instances where sediment and minerals have changed bodies of water into dreamlike scenes. Peyto Lake in Banff National Park in Alberta has its greenish blue shade due to glacial sediments in its water. Meanwhile, the Chinese Yellow River has got so much silt that it stays an endless blonde color.

Northern Saskatchewan’s landscapes owe their color to a mineral found in great quantities across northern Canada. “With the purple-sand beaches, of which Candle Lake is one example,” Ansdell said, “the most likely mineral is the garnet mineral”.

The Origin Of The Garnet Mineral

Canadian-Shield-Map
Canadian-Shield-Map

For ages, this resistant and colorful mineral has been found in rocks over the Canadian Shield. This landmass is rich in minerals and expands to almost of parts the north side of Saskatchewan.

Garnet is formed during metamorphism. This is a mineralogical and chemical process that occurs when rocks become buried deep inside the shell of the Earth as its tectonic plates move. And these movements transported the rocks across the province. Then, icebergs slid across exposed parts of the Canadian Shield, spreading their contents in many areas. 

As time goes by, freshwater sources break these rocks and carry them downstream. Finally, down the stream, these rocks are collected in one place. And this beach is obviously one of them.

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Maris Lopez
Maris Lopezhttp:////my-lifestyle.co
Hey there! I'm Maris, an American girl who is passionate about adventure, the outdoors and all things travel!
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