Sand for Students is a program in which students themselves collect sand from nearby rivers and seashores, to build a worldwide sand database. What’s interesting about collectingsand, you might wonder. ‘Isn’t sand all the same?’ But look at it closely and you will see that sand differs, depending on where it is found. A region’s sand, in fact, is packed full of all sorts of information about its geology. The sand data your research provides will also be used as references for comparison with the core samples acquired by the scientific deep-sea drilling. In the course of collecting those extremely important materials, you will also experience the satisfactions of doing fieldwork, using your hands, body, and mind to carry out the program. We also hope that participating will get you thinking about this Earth on which we all live.

Students collect, observe, and analyze sand from nearby rivers and seashores. Through understanding the series of processes by which river-born sediments form the formation that lie under their own feet, where they live, they will develop a deeper interest in the geosciences and environmental science. And directly linking students’ actions to the most advanced geoscientific research; the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), generates a sense of participating in science and stirs up interest in studying the sciences.

Actually observing formations and rocks outdoors, learning through touching them, is extremely important in geological understanding. This program also gives students can chance to experience the pleasures (and difficulties) of outdoor researches, by actually going out into the field and working, and also serves as basic training for scientific research—formulating a hypothesis and verifying it through logical thought grounded in data.
Furthermore, in connection with the cores that will be acquired by the ocean drilling program, the analytic data on the sand students themselves collect will be scholarly useful materials making up a database of sediments carried by rivers, for analysis of the sedimentary source regions at the drill site.