Research Notes: The Great Sand Heist
How I Researched Global Sand Mining as Criminal Enterprise
The question that started this: why does a planet ringed with sandy beaches face a shortage of usable sand? Desert sand is useless (grains too rounded, won’t bond in concrete). The sand that matters, river sand and sea-floor sand, is the stuff being stripped from riverbeds in West Africa and dredged from the South China Sea at industrial scale. Once that framing clicked, the research opened up fast.
