It’s nearing that time of year: the official season of standing on the shoreline while the waves nibble away the sand from between your bare toes. But while you’re there, kneel down – because sand is beautiful.

What you’re looking at is the same dull beige grains you see at the beach, in your car and clinging to your towel, in that order. From where you stand up there, sand grains blend together into the colour of….well, sand. But lay your hands on a 3D microscope as Gary Greenberg has, and sand becomes a series of richly coloured microcosms. It’s a jumbled record of thousands of years of our sedimentary and volcanic environment (look at the amazing photos here, over at Discover). Greenberg has assembled all his work into A Grain Of Sand: Nature’s Secret Wonder (Amazon listing here).

But we humans have our ways too. Take the Buddhist tradition of making sand mandalas.

The Tibetan monks in the above picture are using the traditional metal funnel known as the chak-pur. It’s filled with colored sand, and when a metal rod is scraped along one ridged side, the vibration makes the sand run out like a tiny stream of water…

The results can be astonishing.

And slightly three-dimensional Sand grains image: Gary Greenberg

Image of monks building mandala: GirlReporter

Image of sand mandala: shutter.chick