Thread by @EdConwaySky

⌛️THE WORLD'S MOST IMPORTANT SAND⌛️
This is the story of how we are all - all of us, human civilisation as we know it - TOTALLY dependent on a small town in rural America to keep the modern world turning.
It's the wild story of the world's purest, and most prized, sand
🧵

There are LOADS of different types of sands. Sands used for construction, for glassmaking, for foundries, for purifying water etc etc.
But the type of sand we're interested is incredibly rare. It's called high purity quartz.
It's very unusual indeed

Here's what it looks like.
An incredibly white, fine sand which is 99.999% silica.
This is far, far purer than the sand you use to make glass.
It's the purest sand in the world.
And there's only one place in the world which mines it in significant quantity: Spruce Pine, NC

btw if you're looking at that sand👆wondering whether you've seen it before... you probably have!
Spruce Pine sand is what goes in the iconic sand traps at the Augusta National golf course where they play the Masters.
But that's just the start of it... https://t.co/APvj7syU9ngolfmonthly.com/tour/us-master…

Anyway, due to a geological freak, this small town in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina is the only place in the world where this super-pure sand is mined at scale.
It is ALL mined by TWO companies - but most is controlled by a company called Sibelco

Sibelco are super publicity shy.
They NEVER do interviews. NEVER let anyone on site. There are stories about how they supposedly blindfold outside contractors coming to work on machinery at Spruce Pine. Why the secrecy?
Because this stuff is VERY important sibelco.com/materials/high…

You see, the key use for high purity quartz is to make crucibles used in the Czochralski process, which turns super-pure silicon into the quite literally PERFECT silicon from which we make silicon chips 👇
All the silicon in your device is made this way

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1682013113829171200?s=20

When it comes to these crucibles in which the silicon in your computer chip is made, no other sand will do. It MUST be high purity quartz. Anything less pure will introduce impurities which would mean your computer chip wouldn't work.
Only Spruce Pine sand can be used

We all know these days how much semiconductors matter.
Without them we're back in the dark ages.
But you can't make silicon chips without silicon and you can't make that super pure silicon without these crucibles 👆and you can't make these crucibles without this very special sand

Perhaps you're starting to see the significance of this.
The chips in EVERY single computer & smartphone in the world only exist thanks to the sand from a SINGLE place. Spruce Pine.
It might be the single most important place on the planet.
And most people have never heard of it

In part this is because we rarely stop & ask: hang on, where does the stuff we rely on every day actually COME from?
It's a question I've tried to answer in my book #materialworld. This thread is one tiny fragment of hundreds of stories in there. lnk.to/MaterialWorld