How to make sand.

IAmJoseph writes: I cannot think of any process to produce sand that doesn't require water somewhere along the way. In theory, maybe you could have an ash fall that consisted of only sand-sized particles, but there are two problems with that. One, volcanic eruptions tend not to be good at sorting particle sizes, and two, they involve water (in the explosion itself). Maybe three problems: I cannot think of any ash beds I've seen where there is a significant sand-sized fraction to the ash--so maybe eruptions don't produce much material at that size. Actually, one process might be if you had asteroid impacts breaking down pre-existing rocks (and we're ignoring the fact that water might have been involved in the production of those pre-existing rocks) and you had wind sorting the resulting material and depositing a body of sand-sized particles, then okay...

(this is an old comment, but relevant)
The Matt wrote: But if we're going to be really pedantic, the weathering products themselves aren't sand. Breaking down a rock doesn't sort the resulting weathering products...there are going to be bits of the rock that aren't sand-sized--turning them into a body of sand requires some sorting/transport/deposition mechanism. These ARE physical processes. Even if you produce biogenic clasts by some fully chemical process--maybe precipitate them totally out of the water column and the process only precipitates sand-sized particles--the process of those particles settling and accumulating is a physical one.

Buzsaw wrote: First the Windrivers (I love those mountains!) are eroding significantly, at a measurable rate.Second (and I'm presuming you're talking about streams IN the Windrivers?), most of the waterways up in the mountains are headwaters and are doing most of their weathering by chemical means. Not only that, but flow in those channels is highly variable and beds tend not to have a huge sand bedload. That being said, the bedloads of many of the channel's I have seen in the Windrivers were definitely sandy. What does "uniform sanding" mean? I have no idea what you're talking about. There have been times in Earth history with higher sea levels than today, where much of the currently exposed land was submerged. Is this what you mean by more watery? If there is no atmosphere, where does the water come from (waves and erosion)?

What sort of chemical can you think of that doesn't involve water? I cannot come up with one. Yep. Probably, that is how gravitational sorting works on Earth.

Wow...I have to admit that one didn't occur to me. Since you posed the question specifically related to the flood, I don't think we have to wrack our brains going too far off the reservation to create sand bodies. All relevant processes will involve normal Earth surface materials and processes I would think. Good luck in getting an actual model out of them. What they always seem to choose to forget is that the people who really got the science of sedimentology going were in large part creationists trying to explain what they saw within a Biblical framework. They couldn't do it. Everything they found disproved the notion of a global flood. I think we're past the point where we have to indulge them by trying to come up with mechanisms. As far as I'm concerned, they have to come up with plausible ways of explaining what exists out there in a flood context and disprove our evidence against a flood. Like, for example, I would love for them to explain, as a flood deposit, the interbedded sandstone and mudstone bodies with sporadic coal seams that characterize the Upper Cretaceous Lance Formation in eastern Wyoming/southern Montana.

Happy to...can you educate me on exactly how to do that?

done. thanks.