Sand
How a sand scientist helped win World War II, I'll get to that shortly.
When you think of sand, thoughts of the ocean and sand castles probably come to mind. But sand can be found in much more than beachfronts. Sand is a key ingredient in concrete for skyscrapers, silicon for computer chips, and the glass for your smartphone. Vince Beiser, journalist and author of the book The World in a Grain: "The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization," tells us.
How a sand scientist helped win World War II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_Campaign
THE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY 11, 1941, WAS SLEEPY AND QUIET AT THE FORT DEEP IN THE SAHARA IN ITALIAN-OCCUPIED LIBYA, IN AN OASIS CALLED MURZUQ. THOUGH THEIR COMRADES BACK HOME WERE EMBROILED IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR RAGING ACROSS EUROPE, THE ITALIAN SOLDIERS GUARDING THIS OUTPOST, A STRATEGIC ROAD JUNCTION, FELT COMFORTABLY DISTANT FROM THE BATTLE. AS FAR AS THEY KNEW, THE CLOSEST ENEMY WAS HUNDREDS OF MILES AWAY, IN BRITISH-CONTROLLED EGYPT. MURZUQ’S DEFENDERS WERE SO RELAXED, SOME OF THEM WERE OUTSIDE THE WALLS FOR AN AFTER-LUNCH STROLL.
Out of nowhere, a column of military trucks and jeeps came roaring toward the fort, spitting machine-gun fire. The invaders—British, French, and New Zealander troops—split into two groups. One hammered the compound with mortars and machine-gun fire, while the second raced toward a nearby airfield. Before most of the aerodrome defenders had time to reach their weapons, the commandos overran them. The Allied troops leaped from their vehicles, dashed into the hangar, poured gasoline over the three bombers inside, and set them ablaze. Snatching up several Italians as prisoners, the strike force sped away, disappearing into the Sahara. Sahara is an arabic word for "sand," so the descriptive moniker The Sahara Sand Desert, is somewhat redundant.
You can’t blame the Italians for having let down their guard. The attack seemed impossible. How could nearly two dozen enemy vehicles have traveled, undetected, across all those miles of rock and sand?
That night, from a remote desert camp, the Allied soldiers—members of an elite squad known as the Long Range Desert Group—related news of the assault via a wireless transceiver to British headquarters in Cairo, Egypt. There, Ralph Alger Bagnold, a tall, sinewy British army lieutenant colonel, received the report with satisfaction.
Bagnold had founded the Long Range Desert Group the previous year, and had handpicked and trained its soldiers. It was his unmatched skills as an explorer of the Sahara that had made it possible for the commandos to travel through the trackless wasteland for the 16 days it had taken to reach Murzuq. Bagnold, a rare combination of soldier and scientist, understood the desert better than any European alive. He had not only devised the techniques and innovations that allowed cars to drive atop oceans of sand, but he had also unraveled the mystery of how the grains of sand themselves move. His career already included action in two different world wars. He couldn’t have known at the time, but one day it would range across two different worlds.
BAGNOLD WAS BORN IN 1896, IN DEVONPORT, ENGLAND,
to a genteel family with a long tradition of military service. His father had fought in some of Great Britain’s colonial battles in Africa but served mainly as an engineer. Conversant with carpentry, metalworking, and other trades, he was known for being able to make, fix, or jury-rig just about anything, skills he passed on to his son. Young Ralph started studying engineering at age 13. Scorning football and cricket, he spent his afternoons learning to use lathes, metalworking tools, and milling machines.
By the time he was 19, in 1915, Bagnold was a second lieutenant in the British army and enrolled in its venerable military engineering school. “We learned a great deal that was lastingly useful—how to dig almost effortlessly, how to lift and move great weights with rope and pulleys, a bit of surveying and mapmaking, and how to destroy with explosives,” Bagnold wrote in Sand, Wind and War, his 1990 autobiography. “Still more important, we learned to improvise.”
He also learned to design battle trenches, and soon found himself fighting in them. Sent to France in World War I, Bagnold served on the front lines of some of its most brutal battles. “There was always some poison gas around from German shells,” he recalled with trademark British reserve. “Sometimes we had to don our clumsy masks, but usually we just coughed our way through.”
In the mid-1920s, the army posted Bagnold to Egypt. The desert entranced him—its immensity, its mystery, the alluring fact that so much of it was unknown. “In Cairo we had at our very doorstep the edge of a vast field for real exploration,” he wrote in his memoir. The eastern Sahara is “the most arid region on Earth, waterless and lifeless save for a few artesian oases scattered several hundred miles apart.”
Bagnold’s peers told him the sands couldn’t be crossed in a motor vehicle. “This struck me as an irresistible challenge,” he recalled. Peace-time soldiering allowed him plenty of time to explore. With friends, he started venturing into the wastelands with the sturdiest machines he could find, Model T and Model A Fords. The group ranged around eastern Egypt, the Sinai, what was then Transjordan and Palestine, and finally into the Sahara itself, penetrating deeper than any European had ever gone.
Ford had not designed its cars for this kind of off-roading. So Bagnold, with plenty of trial and error, devised a series of modifications that allowed his crew to drive in sand, and to survive for weeks at a time in the parched terrain. To conserve water for the cars, Bagnold soldered pipes onto the radiators to capture escaping steam, which collected into a metal can, condensed, and recirculated. Because the magnetism of the vehicles’ ample metal and moving parts threw off conventional compasses, Bagnold navigated by bolting a sun compass
onto the dashboard. To cut down weight, he stripped off bumpers, hoods, and windshields, and even replaced portions of the car bodies with wood. Knowing the unholy beating the elements would inflict on the vehicles, the explorers didn’t just pack spare tires; they practically packed spare cars. Every few days they spent hours patching rubber by hand, or swapping out damaged epicyclic gears and suspension springs.
During these years of experimentation, Bagnold drove some 20,000 miles, much of it in trackless territory. Of course, the cars also got stuck. To cope, Bagnold used perforated steel “channels”—essentially, portable ramps—and canvas-and-rope mats to lay under the wheels to gain traction. They worked but with tremendous effort: “At one moment you would be doing a steady thirty miles an hour to the reassuring whine of the tyres; the next halted dead in five yards with the car up to its axle in a dry ‘quicksand,’” wrote one of his traveling companions, William Boyd Kennedy Shaw, in his memoir Long Range Desert Group: Behind Enemy Lines in
North Africa. “Using sand channels and sand mats, and with a dozen sweating and cursing men, the truck would be extricated two yards at a time.” adventure, but Bagnold became fascinated by the titanic dunes and the tiny grains that formed them. In the desert, he later wrote, “instead of finding chaos and disorder, the observer never fails to be amazed at a simplicity of form, an exactitude of repetition and a geometric order unknown in nature on a scale larger than that of crystalline structure. In places vast accumulations of sand weighing millions of tons move inexorably, in regular formation, over the surface of the country, growing, retaining their shape, even breeding.”
How, he wondered, did the dunes keep their shape while traveling? Why did sand accumulate on them instead of spreading out? How did the individual granules move? Geologists had studied the origins of sand, and engineers used empirical techniques to predict sediment flows, but no one had applied the principles of physics to explain the movement of the grains.
After retiring from the army and returning home, Bagnold set out to be the first. Ever the improviser, he built a wind tunnel out of plywood and glass and set it up in borrowed space at Imperial College London. “I felt it was really just exploring in another form,” he later reminisced. Using his practical knowledge of physics, mathematics, and engineering, he ran hundreds of sand samples through the tunnel. He recorded and photographed the ways in which wind at varying strengths moved different-size grains, and how the grains interacted on the ground and in the air.
He found that as winds lift sand into the air, the grains affect the wind’s movement. And as the wind’s movement of sand changes the shape of the desert floor, that shifting surface affects how both move. Among Bagnold’s key discoveries was that windblown grains jump, a movement known as saltation: They briefly rise into the air, crash back to the ground, and bounce up again. In the process, they can transfer energy to larger grains on the ground, nudging them forward in a process called surface creep.
To describe these movements, Bagnold developed mathematical formulas that he later checked against real-world conditions in the Egyptian-Libyan desert during a return trip there in 1938.
At once HE AND HIS FRIENDS MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN IT FOR THE
point, he lost his goggles. “I spent some very uncomfortable hours sitting in the open, directly exposed to a violent sandblast, trying to keep my eyes open while taking readings from an array of gauges and sand traps,” he recalled in his memoir. “The purpose of eyelashes was very evident.”
After five years of research, he had enough data to write a book, The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. It was the first scientific investigation of the subject, and is considered a foundational text in the study of aeolian, or wind-driven, processes. “His book was seminal,” says Haim Tsoar, a leading expert in the subject at Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev. “I think he was a genius.”
BUT BEFORE THE BOOK COULD BE PUBLISHED, WORLD WAR II BROKE out.
Summoned back to the army, Bagnold found himself once again in Egypt. There, Britain’s troops faced off across the Sahara against a larger Italian fascist force in Libya. Examining maps of the region, Bagnold realized that his eccentric hobby could be converted into a practical weapon.
In 1940, with Italy plainly preparing to invade Egypt from Libya, Bagnold pitched the British commander, Gen. Archibald Wavell, on his idea: a specially trained, fast-moving commando force that could strike from deep in the desert. Wavell was sold. He gave Bagnold a free hand to sow whatever havoc he could in Libya. Bagnold recruited volunteers, ransacked military warehouses, and rummaged Cairo junk shops for his unconventional needs: sandals, Arab headdresses, trouser clips to hold down wind-tossed maps, and lots of spare tires.
Bagnold took a small fleet of Chevrolet 1.5-ton trucks and outfitted them with his sand channels, sun compasses, and other innovations. He cut off windshields, installed extra-strength springs, and mounted Bofors anti-aircraft guns on their beds. He organized teams into 30-man units. “These patrols had to be completely self-contained for long independent action, out of reach of any possibility of help,” Bagnold told a radio journalist in 1941. “Each needed to be an army in miniature.”
A typical patrol comprised around 10 trucks and jeeps. One truck carried communications and navigation gear. Another toted heavy weapons. The rest carted
fuel and supplies. The LRDG’s raids became legendary; even today the group has many fans, foremost among them Jack Valenti, founder of the California-based Long Range Desert Group Preservation Society. Valenti and his comrades have spent numberless hours and tens of thousands of dollars researching and re-creating the LRDG’s trucks and jeeps. He and a few friends showed off one of them at a convention of military-vehicle enthusiasts in Northern California this past April. The roofless 1.5-ton Chevy truck, built in the early 1940s, was fitted out with rolled-up canvas sand mats clamped to the front bumpers, and perforated steel sand channels—the ramps to put under stuck wheels—lashed along the sides. A sun compass was bolted to the wooden dashboard. The uncovered cargo bed was neatly packed with spare parts, medical gear, wooden crates for ammunition, and canvas bags of rations, including cans of Libby’s corned beef, an actual brand Bagnold’s men ate. “Bagnold was a brilliant man,” says Kevin Canham, a snowy-bearded former high school teacher, Navy vet, and preservation society member. “He was the World War II version of Lawrence of Arabia.”
In fall 1940, Bagnold’s LRDG, made up of a few old comrades plus 150 New Zealand volunteers, rode into action. Camouflaged amid the dunes, they spied on enemy troop movements, radioing their intelligence back to British forces in Cairo. They launched lightning surprise raids on Axis garrisons and airfields, then vanished back into the expanse of the Sahara. They cultivated a desert-pirate look, sporting Arab headdresses, unkempt beards, and a scorpion insignia, to the excitement of the press back home.
Their impact belied their size. One year after the LRDG took to the field, Wavell wrote in a dispatch: “Not only have the patrols brought back much information, but they have attacked enemy forts, captured personnel [and] transport and grounded aircraft as far as 800 miles inside hostile territory. They have protected Egypt and the Sudan from any possibility of raids, and have caused the enemy…to tie up considerable forces in the defense of distant outposts.”
In July 1941, at age 45, finally weary of the heat and harsh living conditions, Bagnold handed over the LRDG command and took a post in Cairo. The group fought on until the Axis was defeated in Africa in 1943. It went on to missions in Greece, Italy, and the Balkans before disbanding at the war’s end.
WITH PEACE, BAGNOLD RETURNED TO ENGLAND, MARRIED,
had two children, and settled down in rural Kent. His career as a desert fighter was over, but he was about to launch a new vocation as a desert expert. His work on the physics of windblown sand had, to his astonishment, gotten him elected a Fellow of the Royal Society— one of Britain’s premier scientific honors. “It was more surprising because I was merely an amateur scientist with no academic standing,” he wrote in his memoir. There was an upside to that: “Being an amateur, a free lance who never held any academic post or had any professional status, I had the rather unusual advantage of considering problems with an open mind, unbiased by traditional textbook ideas that had remained untested against facts.”
Bagnold’s knowledge proved valuable. Oil and gas companies building installations in the desert sought him out for help understanding how to cope with the ever-shifting sands. He advised British Petroleum on building a pipeline across a huge swath of desert in
Libya, and explained to oil executives in Iran the basics of how sand moves and how to build fences to keep it out.
But Bagnold devoted most of his energy to research, turning his attention to the study of how rivers transport sediments, a field in which he also made important contributions. His 50-years-long creative and interdisciplinary approach to sediment physics “enabled today’s earth scientists and engineers to plan and pursue projects equipped with a deep, if still imperfect, understanding of these critical natural processes,” wrote the late geologist and fellow arenophile Michael Welland. Bagnold authored nearly 50 scientific papers and racked up prestigious awards from the National Academy of Sciences and the Geological Society of America, as well as two honorary doctoral degrees. Still, “he was extremely modest,” says his son, Stephen Bagnold. “Nine-tenths of him was always hidden.”
Bagnold’s career could have ended with World War II, and he would still be assured a place in the history books. But there was one more phase to come.
For several years, Bagnold worked with the agency, including coauthoring a paper with Carl Sagan. “I spent one evening at a McDonald’s with a small group of young scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,” Bagnold wrote later in his autobiography. “It was fascinating for an old man of eighty-one to listen to their casual talk of navigating a spacecraft two hundred million miles away as easily as an aeroplane. Man had not begun to fly at all when I was born.”
Almost until the end of his life, the old soldier-scientist stayed active, publishing his final papers—one, oddly, includes an analysis of the random distributions of word lengths in different languages— in the 1980s. His last paper appeared in 1986, when Bagnold was 90 years old. He died four years later.
“He’s still very much present in the modern field,” Ehlmann says. She should know. Over four months, beginning in late 2015, Ehlmann helped lead NASA’s Curiosity rover on the first exploration of a dune field conducted on another planet. The rover uncovered important information on the history of the Martian landscape and the chemistry of its components. In honor of the man who “revolutionized our understanding of aeolian processes on Earth,” as Ehlmann put it in a recent paper on the mission, her team bestowed a fitting name on the formations. Millions of miles from the nearest human habitation, the remotest desert ever explored by a man-made vehicle now includes an area known as the Bagnold Sand Dunes.
...
Fast FWD: The Deadly Global War for Sand, Today.
Indian workers crush stone into sand at an illegal mine near Raipur Village in India on March 18, 2015.
The killers rolled slowly down the narrow alley, three men jammed onto a single motorcycle. It was a little after 11 am on July 31, 2013, the sun beating down on the low, modest residential buildings lining a back street in the Indian farming village of Raipur Khadar. Faint smells of cooking spices, dust, and sewage seasoned the air. The men stopped the bike in front of the orange door of a two-story brick-and-plaster house. Two of them dismounted, eased open the unlocked door, and slipped into the darkened bedroom on the other side. White kerchiefs covered their lower faces. One of them carried a pistol.
Inside the bedroom Paleram Chauhan, a 52-year-old farmer, was napping after an early lunch. In the next room, his wife and daughter-in-law were cleaning up while Paleram's son played with his 3-year-old nephew.
Aakash Chauhan and Preeti Chauhan stand for a portrait at their home.
Adam Ferguson
Gunshots thundered through the house. Preeti Chauhan, Paleram's daughter-in-law, rushed into Paleram's room, Ravindra, right behind her. Through the open door, they saw the killers jump back on their bike and roar away.
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Paleram lay on his bed, blood bubbling out of his stomach, neck, and head. "He was trying to speak, but he couldn't," Preeti says, her voice breaking with tears. Ravindra borrowed a neighbor's car and rushed his father to a hospital, but it was too late. Paleram was dead on arrival.
Despite the masks, the family had no doubts about who was behind the killing. For 10 years Paleram had been campaigning to get local authorities to shut down a powerful gang of criminals headquartered in Raipur Khadar. The "mafia," as people called them, had for years been robbing the village of a coveted natural resource, one of the most sought-after commodities of the 21st century: sand.
That's right. Paleram Chauhan was killed over sand. And he wasn’t the first, or the last.
Construction in Uttar Pradesh, India. Any building that needs concrete needs sand.
Adam Ferguson
Our civilization is literally built on sand. People have used it for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance's scientific revolution (also, affordable windows). Sand of various kinds is an essential ingredient in detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips, and especially buildings; every concrete structure is basically tons of sand and gravel glued together with cement.
Sand—small, loose grains of rock and other hard stuff—can be made by glaciers grinding up stones, by oceans degrading seashells, even by volcanic lava chilling and shattering upon contact with air. But nearly 70 percent of all sand grains on Earth are quartz, formed by weathering. Time and the elements eat away at rock, above and below the ground, grinding off grains. Rivers carry countless tons of those grains far and wide, accumulating them in their beds, on their banks, and at the places where they meet the sea.
Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. There's so much demand that riverbeds and beaches around the world are being stripped bare. (Desert sand generally doesn't work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well.) And the amount of sand being mined is increasing exponentially.
Though the supply might seem endless, sand is a finite resource like any other. The worldwide construction boom of recent years—all those mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to Beijing—is devouring unprecedented quantities; extracting it is a $70 billion industry. In Dubai enormous land-reclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper-building have exhausted all the nearby sources. Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs.
Workers wash stone before it gets crushed into sand at an illegal mine near Raipur Village.
Adam Ferguson
In some places multinational companies dredge it up with massive machines; in others local people haul it away with shovels and pickup trucks. As land quarries and riverbeds become tapped out, sand miners are turning to the seas, where thousands of ships now vacuum up huge amounts of the stuff from the ocean floor. As you might expect, all this often wreaks havoc on rivers, deltas, and marine ecosystems. Sand mines in the US are blamed for beach erosion, water and air pollution, and other ills, from the California coast to Wisconsin’s lakes. India's Supreme Court recently warned that riparian sand mining is undermining bridges and disrupting ecosystems all over the country, slaughtering fish and birds. But regulations are scant and the will to enforce them even more so, especially in the developing world.
Sand mining has erased at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world's largest sand importer. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all restricted or banned exports of sand to Singapore.
All of that has spawned a worldwide boom in illegal sand mining. On Indonesia's island of Bali, far inland from the tourist beaches, I visit a sand mining area. It looks like Shangri-La after a meteor strike. Smack in the middle of a beautiful valley winding between verdant mountains, surrounded by jungle and rice paddies, is a raggedy 14-acre black pit of exposed sand and rock. On its floor, men in shorts and flip-flops wield sledgehammers and shovels to load sand and gravel into clattering, smoke-belching sorting machines.
"Those who have permits to dig for sand have to pay for land restoration," says Nyoman Sadra, a former member of the regional legislature. "But 70 percent of the sand miners have no permits." Even companies with permits spread bribes around so they can get away with digging pits wider or deeper than they’re allowed to.
Today criminal gangs in at least a dozen countries, from Jamaica to Nigeria, dredge up tons of the stuff every year to sell on the black market. Half the sand used for construction in Morocco is estimated to be mined illegally; whole stretches of beach there are disappearing. One of Israel's most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favors in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.
But nowhere is the struggle for sand more ferocious than in India. Battles among and against "sand mafias" there have reportedly killed hundreds of people in recent years—including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people like Paleram Chauhan.
Raipur Village, where Paleram Chauhan was killed.
Adam Ferguson
The area around Raipur Khadar used to be mostly agricultural—wheat and vegetables growing in the Yamuna River floodplain. But Delhi, less than an hour's drive north, is encroaching fast. Driving down a new six-lane expressway that cuts through Gautam Budh Nagar, the district in which Raipur Khadar sits, I pass construction site after construction site, new glass and cement towers sprouting skyward like the opening credits from Game of Thrones made real across miles of Indian countryside. Besides countless generic shopping malls, apartment blocks, and office towers, a 5,000-acre "Sports City" is under construction, including several stadiums and a Formula 1 racetrack.
The building boom got in gear about a decade ago, and so did the sand mafias. "There was some illegal sand mining before," says Dushynt Nagar, the head of a local farmers' rights organization, "but not at a scale where land was getting stolen or people were getting killed."
The Chauhan family has lived in the area for centuries, Paleram's son Aakash tells me. He's a slim young guy with wide brown eyes and receding black hair, wearing jeans, a grey sweatshirt, and flip-flops. We're sitting on plastic chairs set on the bare concrete floor of the family's living room, just a few yards from where his father was killed.
The family owns about 10 acres of land, and shares some 200 acres of communal land with the village—or used to. About 10 years ago a group of local "musclemen," as Aakash calls them, led by Rajpal Chauhan (no relation—it's a common surname) and his three sons, seized control of the communal land. They stripped away its topsoil and started digging up the sand built up by centuries of the Yamuna's floods. To make matters worse, the dust kicked up by the operation stunted the growth of surrounding crops.
Aakash Chauhan stands at the door of his father's old bedroom.
Adam Ferguson
As a member of the village panchayat, or governing council, Paleram took the lead in a campaign to get the sand mine shut down. It should have been pretty straightforward. Aside from stealing the village's land, sand mining is not permitted in the Raipur Khadar area at all because it's close to a bird sanctuary. And the government knows it’s happening: In 2013 a fact-finding team from the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests found "rampant, unscientific, and illegal mining" all over Gautam Budh Nagar.
Nonetheless, Paleram and other villagers couldn't get it stopped. They petitioned police, government officials, and courts for years—and nothing happened. The conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business—and not infrequently, are involved in the business themselves.
For those who don't take the carrot of a bribe, the mafias aren't shy about using a stick. "We do conduct raids on the illegal sand miners," says Navin Das, the official in charge of mining in Gautam Budh Nagar. "But it's very difficult because we get attacked and shot at." In the past three years, sand miners have killed at least two police officers and attacked many others, as well as government officials and whistle-blowers. Just this March, soon after I returned from India, an assault by illegal sand miners put a television journalist in the hospital.
According to court documents, Rajpal and his sons threatened Paleram and his family as well as other villagers. Aakash knows one of the sons, Sonu, from when they were kids in school together. "He used to be a decent guy," Aakash says. "But when he got into the sand business and started making fast money, he developed a criminal mentality and became very aggressive." Finally, in the spring of 2013, police arrested Sonu and impounded some of his outfit's trucks. He was soon out on bail, though.
One morning Paleram rode his bicycle out to his fields, which are right next to the sand mine, and ran into Sonu. "He said, 'It's your fault I was in jail,'" according to Aakash. "He told my father to drop the issue." Instead Paleram complained to the police again. A few days later, he was shot dead.
Sonu, his brother Kuldeep, and his father, Rajpal, were arrested for the killing. All of them are currently out on bail. Aakash sees them around sometimes. "It's a small village," he says.
Sand mining boats work illegally on the Thane Creek in Maharashtra, India, on March 20, 2015. Workers dive to the bottom with a metal bucket to scoop sand; the boat crew hauls it to the surface.
Adam Ferguson
The broad, murky Thane Creek, just outside Mumbai, is swarmed with small wooden boats on a recent February morning. Hundreds of them are anchored together, hull to hull, in a ragged line stretching at least half a mile. The river's banks are lined with green mangroves, towered over by apartment blocks. There's a faint tang of salt in the air from the nearby Arabian Sea, mixed with diesel from the boats' engines.
Each boat carries a crew of six to 10 men. One or two of them dive down to the river bottom, fill a metal bucket with sand, and return to the surface, water streaming from their black hair and mustaches. Then two others, standing barefoot on planks jutting from the boat, haul up the bucket with ropes. Their lean, muscular physiques would be the envy of any hipster gym rat if they weren't so hard-earned.
Pralhad Mhatre, 41, does about 200 dives a day, he says. He's worked the job for 16 years. It pays nearly twice what the pullers get, but it's still not much—about $16 a day. He wants his son and three daughters to go into some other profession, not least because he thinks the river's sand will soon be mined out. "When I started, we only had to go down 20 feet," he says. "Now it's 40. We can only dive 50 feet. If it gets much lower, we'll be out of a job."
A sand diver gets ready for another trip to the bottom of Thane Creek.
Adam Ferguson
The next day Sumaira Abdulali, India's foremost campaigner against illegal sand mining, takes me to see a different kind of mine. Abdulali is a decorous, well-heeled member of the Mumbai bourgeoisie, gentle of voice and genteel of manner. For years she has been traveling to remote areas in a leather-upholstered, chauffeur-driven sedan, snapping pictures of sand mafias at work. In the process she's been insulted, threatened, pelted with rocks, pursued at high speeds, had her car windows smashed, and been punched hard enough to break a tooth.
Abdulali got involved when sand miners started tearing up a beach near Mumbai where her family has vacationed for generations. In 2004 she filed the first citizen-initiated court action against sand mining in India. It made the newspapers, which in turn brought Abdulali a flood of calls from others around the country who wanted her help stopping their own local sand mafias. Abdulali has since helped dozens file their own court cases and keeps a steady stream of her own well-documented complaints flowing to local officials and newspapers. "We can't stop construction. We don't want to halt development," she says in British Indian–accented English. "But we want to put in accountability."
Abdulali takes me to the rural town of Mahad, where sand miners once smashed up her car. Sand mining is completely banned in the area because of its proximity to a protected coastal zone. Nonetheless, in the jungled hills not far outside town, we come to a gray-green river on which boats, in plain view, are sucking up sand from the river bottom with diesel-powered pumps. The riverbanks are dotted with huge piles of sand, which men in excavators are shoveling onto trucks.
Soon after, back on a main road, we find ourselves behind a small convoy of three sand trucks. They rumble, unmolested, past a police van parked on the side of the road. A couple of cops idle next to it, watching the traffic going by. Another is inside taking a nap, his seat fully reclined. This is too much for Abdulali. We pull up alongside the van. An officer who appears to be in charge is lounging inside, wearing a khaki uniform, with stars on his shoulders and black socks on his feet. He has taken his shoes off. "Didn't you see those trucks carrying sand that just went past?" Abdulali asks.
"We filed some cases this morning," answers the cop, genially. "We're on our lunch break now."
As we drive away, we pass another sand truck parked just a few hundred yards down the road.
Some time later I ask a local government official about this. "The police are hand in glove with the miners," says the official, who asks me not to name him. "When I call the police to escort me on a raid, they tip off the miners that we are coming." Even in the cases he'd brought to court, no one was convicted. "They always get off on some technicality."
Workers wash Thane Creek sand before trucking it away.
Adam Ferguson
Back in Raipur Khadar, after I finish talking with Paleram Chauhan's family, his son Aakash agrees to show me and my interpreter, Kumar Sambhav, the village lands where the mafia has taken over. We’d rented a car in Delhi that morning, and Aakash directs our driver to the site. It’s hard to miss: Right across the road from the village center is an expanse of torn-up land pocked with craters 10 and 20 feet deep, stippled with house-sized piles of sand and rock. Here and there trucks and earth-moving machines rumble around, and clusters of men, at least 50 all told, are smashing up rocks with hammers and loading up trucks with shovelfuls of sand. They stop to stare at our car as we drive slowly past on the rutted dirt track running through the mine. Aakash cautiously points out a tall, heavyset guy in jeans and a collared shirt: Sonu.
A short while later, deep inside the site, we get out to snap pictures of a particularly huge crater. After a few minutes Aakash spots four men, three of them carrying shovels, striding purposefully toward us. "Sonu is coming," he mutters.
We start making our way back to the car, trying to look unhurried. But we're too slow. "Motherfucker!" Sonu, now just a few yards away, barks at Aakash. "What are you doing here?"
Aakash keeps silent. Sambhav mumbles something to the effect that we're just tourists, as we all climb into the car. "I'll give you sisterfuckers a tour," Sonu says. He yanks open our driver's door and orders him out. The driver obeys, obliging the rest of us to follow suit. Aakash, wisely, stays put.
"We're journalists," Sambhav says. "We're here to see how the sand mining is going." (This conversation was all in Hindi; Sambhav translated for me afterward.)
"Mining?" Sonu says. "We are not doing any mining. What did you see?"
"We saw whatever we saw. And now we're leaving."
"No, you're not," Sonu says.
The exchange continues along those lines for a couple of increasingly tense minutes, until one of Sonu's goons points out the presence of a foreigner—me. This gives Sonu and his crew pause. Harming a Westerner like me would bring them a lot more trouble than going after a local like Aakash. We grab the opportunity to get back in the car and take off. Sonu, glaring, watches us go.
The case against Sonu and his relatives is grinding its way through India's sluggish courts. The outlook isn't great. "In our system you can easily buy anything with money—witnesses, police, administrative officials," a legal professional close to the case tells me, on condition of anonymity. "And those guys have a lot of money from the mining business."
Aakash keeps in touch with police investigators and has tried to get India's National Human Rights Commission to take an interest. His mother pleads with him to drop the whole thing, especially since her other son, Aakash's brother, Ravindra—who was to have been the main witness in the case—was found dead by some railroad tracks last year, apparently run over by a train. No one is sure how that happened.
Meanwhile, India is fitfully taking steps to get sand mining under control. The National Green Tribunal, a sort of federal court for environmental matters, has opened its doors to any citizen to file a complaint about illegal sand mining. In some places villagers have blocked roads to stop sand trucks, and pretty much every day some local or state official declares their determination to combat sand mining. Sometimes they even impound trucks, levy fines, or make arrests. Even the newly appointed magistrate of Gautam Budh Nagar made a show of cracking down last month, confiscating dozens of sand trucks and arresting several people.
But India is a vast country of more than 1 billion people. It hides hundreds, most likely thousands, of illegal sand mining operations. Corruption and violence will stymie many of even the best-intentioned attempts to crack down. At root, it's an issue of supply and demand. The supply of sand that can be mined sustainably is finite. But the demand for it is not.
Every day the world's population is growing. More and more people in India—and everywhere else—want decent housing to live in, offices and factories to work in, malls to shop in, and roads to connect it all. Economic development as it has historically been understood requires concrete and glass. It requires sand.
"The fundamental problem is the massive use of cement-based construction," says Ritwick Dutta, a leading Indian environmental lawyer. "That's why the sand mafia has become so huge. Sand is everywhere."
A worker packs a truckload of sand near Raipur Village.
How West Africa Helped Win World War II
In June 1940, when France fell to the German invasion, Italy seized the moment to attack British positions in Egypt, Kenya, and Sudan. By the end of March 1941, German Major-General Erwin Rommel’s mechanized troops had driven the British out of Libya and back into Egypt. In late spring, German and Italian aircraft were pummeling Britain’s sea stations in the Mediterranean, making it difficult if not impossible for supply ships to reach British forces in the Middle East. The remaining sea route by which to deliver supplies to Egypt was via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but that was a protracted journey of three to four months, a luxury of time that Britain simply did not have.
In desperation, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his military advisers turned to an underdeveloped, 3,700-mile air route from Takoradi in the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to Cairo, Egypt.
Takoradi’s Major Role
As the starting point of the Allied trans-African supply line to Egypt that became officially known as the West African Reinforcement Route (WARR), Takoradi became one of the most important bases for Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). On September 5, 1940, the first shipment of a dozen Hurricane and Blenheim aircraft fighters in large wooden crates arrived at Takoradi by boat from the United Kingdom, and like many more consignments to come, they were unpacked and then assembled locally to be made airworthy for the flight to Cairo. The six-day journey was undertaken in stages with several rest and refueling stops that included Lagos, Nigeria; Khartoum, Sudan; and Luxor, Egypt. Nelson Gilboe, a Hurricane pilot, describes the Takoradi assembly plant as cut out of the dense forest with monkeys playing in nearby trees. (Simian residents of modern-day Takoradi still frolic in the trees of the Monkey Hill sanctuary.)
The first delivery flight to Cairo left Takoradi on September 20, 1940. Like the flights that were to follow, it was a journey plagued by problems. In the Sahara Desert portion of the route, sand took a severe toll on the aircraft engines. There was no map of the route, and many pilots used ominously burned-out aircraft on the ground as their guide.
In spite of these challenges, between August 1940 and June 1943, over 4,500 British Blenheims, Hurricanes, and Spitfires were assembled at Takoradi and ferried to the Middle East. Between January 1942 and the end of the operation in October 1944, 2,200 Baltimores, Dakotas, and Hudsons arrived from the United States (via the American base at Natal, Brazil, and a mid-Atlantic stop on Ascension Island), and virtually all of them were ferried in similar fashion. There were other final destinations via the Takoradi Route, including India.
Empire and Commonwealth
The term “Allies” is invariably used to refer to the wartime partnership between Britain and the United States, but it was the British Empire that was plunged into war from the very beginning in September 1939, a good two years before the United States took on a combatant role. In her book The British Empire and the Second World War, Ashley Jackson points out that notwithstanding the Eurocentric manner in which World War II is often remembered, the British and many ordinary people around the world viewed the war as an imperial struggle. The idealized image of Britain standing alone after the fall of France is a parochial and inaccurate one. Over a span of centuries, Britain’s imperialism had created an empire comprising dominions, colonies, and protectorates. Whom and where the British fought was largely determined by its empire. After all, there would hardly have been anything for Italy or Japan to quarrel about had it not been for two centuries of British overseas expansion right under their noses.
Churchill and many British government ministers at the time had had direct experience with the Empire and its people, and it was inevitable that the crafting of the war involved the marshaling of Empire and Commonwealth forces. African kings like the Asantehene of the Gold Coast became indispensable resources in this effort because they were able to mobilize their subjects for all manner of projects, whether it was to join the imperial army, help assemble Hurricanes, or construct airfields, harbors, and roads. In the first few years of the war, the RAF recruited 10,000 West Africans for ground duties in the British West Africa colonies of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. To be sure, British personnel, who were succumbing to West Africa’s punishing heat and enervating malarial attacks, needed support from an acclimatized populace in a region of the world sometimes called the “White Man’s Grave.”
Beyond that, West African soldiers went to the battlefront itself. The 4th Gold Coast Infantry Brigade, which later became the 2nd West African Infantry Brigade, contributed 65,000 men to the 1944 Battle of Myohaung, which drove the Japanese out of Burma. Today, in testament to that history, the military section of Accra, Ghana’s capital, is called Burma Camp, and there is a Myohaung Barracks at Takoradi.
Resources and Location
The war brought about a greater demand for Africa’s raw materials. With the loss of Southeast Asia’s rubber to the Japanese, Nigeria became one of Britain’s most important sources of rubber. The Gold Coast’s bauxite, the raw material for aluminum, was critical to British aircraft production. It would be misleading to say, however, that these contributions were all made under blissful conditions. Britain’s ultimately failed attempts to increase tin mining in Nigeria involved forced labor under appalling conditions.
Apart from having the Takoradi air force base on its shores and the headquarters of the West Africa Command at Achimota College, which supplied the 200,000 total military men from the four West African British colonies, the Gold Coast was of strategic importance for another reason: it was bordered on all sides by potentially hostile French colonies that were under the Vichy Government. If the Gold Coast had fallen to the enemy, the West African Reinforcement Route would have come to an end.
The lesson is that the Second World War’s Eurocentric history must be widened to give sub-Saharan Africans and many other world peoples their due. In September 1940, clearly recognizing the critical importance of defending the skies over the Mediterranean, Winston Churchill observed, “The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it.” The contributions and cooperation of Africans along the Takoradi Route made the fulfillment of that principle possible and the defeat of the Axis forces a reality.
THE ULTRA-PURE, SUPER-SECRET SAND THAT MAKES YOUR PHONE POSSIBLE
The processor that makes your laptop or cell phone work was fabricated using quartz from this obscure Appalachian backwater.
FRESH FROM CHURCH on a cool, overcast Sunday morning in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, Alex Glover slides onto the plastic bench of a McDonald’s booth. He rummages through his knapsack, then pulls out a plastic sandwich bag full of white powder. “I hope we don’t get arrested,” he says. “Someone might get the wrong idea.”
GLOVER IS A recently retired geologist who has spent decades hunting for valuable minerals in the hillsides and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains that surround this tiny town. He is a small, rounded man with little oval glasses, a neat white mustache, and matching hair clamped under a Jeep baseball cap. He speaks with a medium‑strength drawl that emphasizes the first syllable and stretches some vowels, such that we’re drinking CAWWfee as he explains why this remote area is so tremendously important to the rest of the world.
Spruce Pine is not a wealthy place. Its downtown consists of a somnambulant train station across the street from a couple of blocks of two‑story brick buildings, including a long‑closed movie theater and several empty storefronts.
The wooded mountains surrounding it, though, are rich in all kinds of desirable rocks, some valued for their industrial uses, some for their pure prettiness. But it’s the mineral in Glover’s bag—snowy white grains, soft as powdered sugar—that is by far the most important these days. It’s quartz, but not just any quartz. Spruce Pine, it turns out, is the source of the purest natural quartz—a species of pristine sand—ever found on Earth. This ultra‑elite deposit of silicon dioxide particles plays a key role in manufacturing the silicon used to make computer chips. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the chip that makes your laptop or cell phone work was made using sand from this obscure Appalachian backwater. “It’s a billion‑dollar industry here,” Glover says with a hooting laugh. “Can’t tell by driving through here. You’d never know it.”
Rocks like these high-grade silica samples mined near Charlotte, North Carolina, are the basis for modern computer chips.
In the 21st century, sand has become more important than ever, and in more ways than ever. This is the digital age, in which the jobs we work at, the entertainment we divert ourselves with, and the ways we communicate with one another are increasingly defined by the internet and the computers, tablets, and cell phones that connect us to it. None of this would be possible were it not for sand.
Most of the world’s sand grains are composed of quartz, which is a form of silicon dioxide, also known as silica. High‑purity silicon dioxide particles are the essential raw materials from which we make computer chips, fiber‑optic cables, and other high‑tech hardware—the physical components on which the virtual world runs. The quantity of quartz used for these products is minuscule compared to the mountains of it used for concrete or land reclamation. But its impact is immeasurable.
Spruce Pine’s mineralogical wealth is a result of the area’s unique geologic history. About 380 million years ago the area was located south of the equator. Plate tectonics pushed the African continent toward eastern America, forcing the heavier oceanic crust—the geologic layer beneath the ocean’s water—underneath the lighter North American continent. The friction of that colossal grind generated heat topping 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the rock that lay between 9 and 15 miles below the surface. The pressure on that molten rock forced huge amounts of it into cracks and fissures of the surrounding host rock, where it formed deposits of what are known as pegmatites.
It took some 100 million years for the deeply buried molten rock to cool down and crystallize. Thanks to the depth at which it was buried and to the lack of water where all this was happening, the pegmatites formed almost without impurities. Generally speaking, the pegmatites are about 65 percent feldspar, 25 percent quartz, 8 percent mica, and the rest traces of other minerals. Meanwhile, over the course of some 300 million years, the plate under the Appalachian Mountains shifted upward. Weather eroded the exposed rock, until the hard formations of pegmatites were left near the surface.
Unimin's North Carolina quartz operations supply most of the world’s high‑ and ultra‑high‑purity quartz.
Native Americans mined the shiny, glittering mica and used it for grave decorations and as currency. American settlers began trickling into the mountains in the 1800s, scratching out a living as farmers. A few prospectors tried their hands at the mica business, but were stymied by the steep mountain geography. “There were no rivers, no roads, no trains. They had to haul the stuff out on horseback,” says David Biddix, a scruffy‑haired amateur historian who has written three books about Mitchell County, where Spruce Pine sits.
The region’s prospects started to improve in 1903 when the South and Western Railroad company, in the course of building a line from Kentucky to South Carolina, carved a track up into the mountains, a serpentine marvel that loops back and forth for 20 miles to ascend just 1,000 feet. Once this artery to the outside world was finally opened, mining started to pick up. Locals and wildcatters dug hundreds of shafts and open pits in the mountains of what became known as the Spruce Pine Mining District, a swath of land 25 miles by 10 miles that sprawls over three counties.
Mica used to be prized for wood‑ and coal‑burning stove windows and for electrical insulation in vacuum tube electronics. It’s now used mostly as a specialty additive in cosmetics and things like caulks, sealants, and drywall joint compound. During World War II, demand for mica and feldspar, which are found in tremendous abundance in the area’s pegmatites, boomed. Prosperity came to Spruce Pine. The town quadrupled in size in the 1940s. At its peak, Spruce Pine boasted three movie theaters, two pool halls, a bowling alley, and plenty of restaurants. Three passenger trains came through every day.
Toward the end of the decade, the Tennessee Valley Authority sent a team of scientists to Spruce Pine tasked with further developing the area’s mineral resources. They focused on the money‑makers, mica and feldspar. The problem was separating those minerals from the other ones. A typical chunk of Spruce Pine pegmatite looks like a piece of strange but enticing hard candy: mostly milky white or pink feldspar, inset with shiny mica, studded with clear or smoky quartz, and flecked here and there with bits of deep red garnet and other‑colored minerals.
For years, locals would simply dig up the pegmatites and crush them with hand tools or crude machines, separating out the feldspar and mica by hand. The quartz that was left over was considered junk, at best fit to be used as construction sand, more likely thrown out with the other tailings.
Working with researchers at North Carolina State University’s Minerals Research Laboratory in nearby Asheville, the TVA scientists developed a much faster and more efficient method to separate out minerals, called froth flotation. “It revolutionized the industry,” Glover says. “It made it evolve from a mom‑and‑pop individual industry to a mega‑multinational corporation industry.”
Froth flotation involves running the rock through mechanical crushers until it’s broken down into a heap of mixed‑mineral granules. You dump that mix in a tank, add water to turn it into a milky slurry, and stir well. Next, add reagents—chemicals that bind to the mica grains and make them hydrophobic, meaning they don’t want to touch water. Now pipe a column of air bubbles through the slurry. Terrified of the water surrounding them, the mica grains will frantically grab hold of the air bubbles and be carried up to the top of the tank, forming a froth on the water’s surface. A paddle wheel skims off the froth and shunts it into another tank, where the water is drained out. Voilà : mica.
The remaining feldspar, quartz, and iron are drained from the bottom of the tank and funneled through a series of troughs into the next tank, where a similar process is performed to float out the iron. Repeat, more or less, to remove the feldspar.
IT WAS THE feldspar, which is used in glassmaking, that first attracted engineers from the Corning Glass Company to the area. At the time, the leftover quartz grains were still seen as just unwanted by‑products. But the Corning engineers, always on the lookout for quality material to put to work in the glass factories, noticed the purity of the quartz and started buying it as well, hauling it north by rail to Corning’s facility in Ithaca, New York, where it was turned into everything from windows to bottles.
One of Spruce Pine quartz’s greatest achievements in the glass world came in the 1930s, when Corning won a contract to manufacture the mirror for what was to be the world’s biggest telescope, ordered by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Making the 200‑inch, 20‑ton mirror involved melting mountains of quartz in a giant furnace heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, writes David O. Woodbury in The Glass Giant of Palomar.
Once the furnace was hot enough, “three crews of men, working day and night around the clock, began ramming in the sand and chemicals through a door at one end. So slowly did the ingredients melt that only four tons a day could be added. Little by little the fiery pool spread over the bottom of the furnace and rose gradually to an incandescent lake 50 feet long and 15 wide.” The telescope was installed in the observatory in 1947. Its unprecedented power led to important discoveries about the composition of stars and the size of the universe itself. It is still in use today.
In the 1930s, Corning won a contract to manufacture the mirror for what was to be the world’s biggest telescope, ordered by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Making the 200‑inch, 20‑ton mirror involved melting mountains of quartz in a giant furnace heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
Significant as that telescope was, Spruce Pine quartz was soon to take on a far more important role as the digital age began to dawn.
In the mid‑1950s, thousands of miles from North Carolina, a group of engineers in California began working on an invention that would become the foundation of the computer industry. William Shockley, a pathbreaking engineer at Bell Labs who had helped invent the transistor, had left to set up his own company in Mountain View, California, a sleepy town about an hour south of San Francisco, near where he had grown up. Stanford University was nearby, and General Electric and IBM had facilities in the area, as well as a new company called Hewlett‑Packard. But the area known at the time as the Santa Clara Valley was still mostly filled with apricot, pear, and plum orchards. It would soon become much better known by a new nickname: Silicon Valley.
At the time, the transistor market was heating up fast. Texas Instruments, Motorola, and other companies were all competing to come up with smaller, more efficient transistors to use in, among other products, computers. The first American computer, dubbed ENIAC, was developed by the army during World War II; it was 100 feet long and 10 feet high, and it ran on 18,000 vacuum tubes.
Transistors, which are tiny electronic switches that control the flow of electricity, offered a way to replace those tubes and make these new machines even more powerful while shrinking their tumid footprint. Semiconductors—a small class of elements, including germanium and silicon, which conduct electricity at certain temperatures while blocking it at others—looked like promising materials for making those transistors.
At Shockley’s startup, a flock of young PhDs began each morning by firing up kilns to thousands of degrees and melting down germanium and silicon. Tom Wolfe once described the scene in Esquire magazine: “They wore white lab coats, goggles, and work gloves. When they opened the kiln doors weird streaks of orange and white light went across their faces . . . they lowered a small mechanical column into the goo so that crystals formed on the bottom of the column, and they pulled the crystal out and tried to get a grip on it with tweezers, and put it under microscopes and cut it with diamond cutters, among other things, into minute slices, wafers, chips; there were no names in electronics for these tiny forms.”
Shockley became convinced that silicon was the more promising material and shifted his focus accordingly. “Since he already had the first and most famous semiconductor research and manufacturing company, everyone who had been working with germanium stopped and switched to silicon,” writes Joel Shurkin in his biography of Shockley, Broken Genius. “Indeed, without his decision, we would speak of Germanium Valley.”
Shockley was a genius, but by all accounts he was also a lousy boss. Within a couple of years, several of his most talented engineers had jumped ship to start their own company, which they dubbed Fairchild Semiconductor. One of them was Robert Noyce, a laid‑back but brilliant engineer, only in his mid‑20s but already famous for his expertise with transistors.
William Shockley worked with the element germanium, as well, before becoming convinced that silicon was the more promising material.
In 1959, when Robert Noyce and his colleagues at Fairchild Semiconductor figured out a way to cram several transistors onto a single fingernail‑sized sliver of high‑purity silicon. He went on to found Intel.
The breakthrough came in 1959, when Noyce and his colleagues figured out a way to cram several transistors onto a single fingernail‑sized sliver of high‑purity silicon. At almost the same time, Texas Instruments developed a similar gadget made from germanium. Noyce’s, though, was more efficient, and it soon dominated the market. NASA selected Fairchild’s microchip for use in the space program, and sales soon shot from almost nothing to $130 million a year. In 1968, Noyce left to found his own company. He called it Intel, and it soon dominated the nascent industry of programmable computer chips.
Intel’s first commercial chip, released in 1971, contained 2,250 transistors. Today’s computer chips are often packed with transistors numbering in the billions. Those tiny electronic squares and rectangles are the brains that run our computers, the Internet, and the entire digital world. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, the computer systems that underpin the work of everything from the Pentagon to your local bank—all of this and much more is based on sand, remade as silicon chips.
Making those chips is a fiendishly complicated process. They require essentially pure silicon. The slightest impurity can throw their tiny systems out of whack.
Finding silicon is easy. It’s one of the most abundant elements on Earth. It shows up practically everywhere bound together with oxygen to form SiO2, aka quartz. The problem is that it never occurs naturally in pure, elemental form. Separating out the silicon takes considerable doing.
Step one is to take high‑purity silica sand, the kind used for glass. (Lump quartz is also sometimes used.) That quartz is then blasted in a powerful electric furnace, creating a chemical reaction that separates out much of the oxygen. That leaves you with what is called silicon metal, which is about 99 percent pure silicon. But that’s not nearly good enough for high‑tech uses. Silicon for solar panels has to be 99.999999 percent pure—six 9s after the decimal. Computer chips are even more demanding. Their silicon needs to be 99.99999999999 percent pure—eleven 9s. “We are talking of one lonely atom of something that is not silicon among billions of silicon companions,” writes geologist Michael Welland in Sand: The Never-Ending Story.
Getting there requires treating the silicon metal with a series of complex chemical processes. The first round of these converts the silicon metal into two compounds. One is silicon tetrachloride, which is the primary ingredient used to make the glass cores of optical fibers. The other is trichlorosilane, which is treated further to become polysilicon, an extremely pure form of silicon that will go on to become the key ingredient in solar cells and computer chips.
Each of these steps might be carried out by more than one company, and the price of the material rises sharply at each step. That first‑step, 99 percent pure silicon metal goes for about $1 a pound; polysilicon can cost 10 times as much.
Semiconductors are a small class of elements, including silicon, which conduct electricity at certain temperatures while blocking it at others.GETTY IMAGES The next step is to melt down the polysilicon. But you can’t just throw this exquisitely refined material in a cook pot. If the molten silicon comes into contact with even the tiniest amount of the wrong substance, it causes a ruinous chemical reaction. You need crucibles made from the one substance that has both the strength to withstand the heat required to melt polysilicon, and a molecular composition that won’t infect it. That substance is pure quartz.
THIS IS WHERE Spruce Pine quartz comes in. It’s the world’s primary source of the raw material needed to make the fused‑quartz crucibles in which computer‑chip‑grade polysilicon is melted. A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high‑purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry.
Today one company dominates production of Spruce Pine quartz. Unimin, an outfit founded in 1970, has gradually bought up Spruce Pine area mines and bought out competitors, until today the company’s North Carolina quartz operations supply most of the world’s high‑ and ultra‑high‑purity quartz. (Unimin itself is now a division of a Belgian mining conglomerate, Sibelco.)
In recent years, another company, the imaginatively titled Quartz Corp, has managed to grab a small share of the Spruce Pine market. There are a very few other places around the world producing high‑purity quartz, and many other places where companies are looking hard for more. But Unimin controls the bulk of the trade.
The quartz for the crucibles, like the silicon they will produce, needs to be almost absolutely pure, purged as thoroughly as possible of other elements. Spruce Pine quartz is highly pure to begin with, and purer still after being put through several rounds of froth flotation. But some of the grains may still have what Glover calls interstitial crystalline contamination—molecules of other minerals attached to the quartz molecules.
That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” says John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.”
Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains are used for high‑end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt‑white traps of Augusta National Golf Club, site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil‑drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world‑class, too.
The very best Spruce Pine quartz, however, has an open crystalline structure, which means that hydrofluoric acid can be injected right into the crystal molecules to dissolve any lingering traces of feldspar or iron, taking the purity up another notch. Technicians take it one step further by reacting the quartz with chlorine or hydrochloric acid at high temperatures, then putting it through one or two more trade‑secret steps of physical and chemical processing.
The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip‑top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO , there are only 80 molecules of impurities. Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.
At his house, Glover shows me some Iota under a microscope. Seen through the instrument’s lens (itself made from a much less pure quartz sand), the jagged little shards are as clear as glass and bright as diamonds.
Unimin sells this ultra‑high‑purity quartz sand to companies like General Electric, which melts it, spins it, and fuses it into what looks like a salad bowl made of milky glass: the crucible. “It’s safe to say the vast majority of those crucibles are made from Spruce Pine quartz,” Schlanz says.
The polysilicon is placed in those quartz crucibles, melted down, and set spinning. Then a silicon seed crystal about the size of a pencil is lowered into it, spinning in the opposite direction. The seed crystal is slowly withdrawn, pulling behind it what is now a single giant silicon crystal. These dark, shiny crystals, weighing about 220 pounds, are called ingots.
Polysilicon is placed in quartz crucibles, melted down, and set spinning.
Dark, shiny crystals of silicon called ingots are sliced into thin wafers. Ingots of the highest purity are polished to mirror smoothness and sold to a chipmaker like Intel.
The ingots are sliced into thin wafers. Some are sold to solar cell manufacturers. Ingots of the highest purity are polished to mirror smoothness and sold to a chipmaker like Intel. It’s a thriving multi-billion dollar industry in 2012.
The chipmaker imprints patterns of transistors on the wafer using a process called photolithography. Copper is implanted to link those billions of transistors to form integrated circuits. Even a minute particle of dust can ruin the chip’s intricate circuitry, so all of this happens in what’s called a clean room, where purifiers keep the air thousands of times cleaner than a hospital operating room. Technicians dress in an all‑covering white uniform affectionately known as a bunny suit. To ensure the wafers don’t get contaminated during manufacture, many of the tools used to move and manipulate them are, like the crucibles, made from high‑purity quartz.
The wafers are then cut into tiny, unbelievably thin quadrangular chips—computer chips, the brains inside your mobile phone or laptop. The whole process requires hundreds of precise, carefully controlled steps. The chip that results is easily one of the most complicated man‑made objects on Earth, yet made with the most common stuff on Earth: humble sand.
The total amount of high‑purity quartz produced worldwide each year is estimated at 30,000 tons—less than the amount of construction sand produced in the United States every hour. (And even construction sand is in high demand; there's a thriving black market in the stuff.) Only Unimin knows exactly how much Spruce Pine quartz is produced, because it doesn’t publish any production figures. It is an organization famously big on secrecy. “Spruce Pine used to be mom‑and‑ pop operations,” Schlanz says. “When I first worked up there, you could just walk into any of the operations. You could just go across the street and borrow a piece of equipment.”
NOWADAYS UNIMIN WON’T even allow staff of the Minerals Research Laboratory inside the mines or processing facilities. Contractors brought in to do repair work have to sign confidentiality agreements. Whenever possible, vice‑president Richard Zielke recently declared in court papers, the company splits up the work among different contractors so that no individual can learn too much.
Unimin buys equipment and parts from multiple vendors for the same reason. Glover has heard of contractors being blindfolded inside the processing plants until they arrive at the specific area where their jobs are and of an employee who was fired on the spot for bringing someone in without authorization. He says the company doesn’t even allow its employees to socialize with those of their competitors.
It was hard to check out Glover’s stories, because Unimin wouldn’t talk to me. Unlike most big corporations, its website lists no contact for a press spokesperson or public relations representative. Several emails to their general inquiries address went unanswered. When I called the company’s headquarters in Connecticut, the woman who answered the phone seemed mystified by the concept of a journalist wanting to ask questions.
She put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back to tell me the company has no PR department, but that if I faxed (faxed!) her my questions, someone might get back to me. Eventually I got in touch with a Unimin executive who asked me to send her my questions by email. I did so. The response: “Unfortunately, we are not in a position to provide answers at this point in time.”
So I tried the direct approach. Like all the quartz mining and processing facilities in the area, Unimin’s Schoolhouse Quartz Plant, set in a valley amid low, thickly treed hills, is surrounded by a barbed‑wire‑topped fence. Security isn’t exactly at the level of Fort Knox, but the message is clear.
One Saturday morning I go to take a look at the plant with David Biddix. We park across the street from the gate. A sign warns that the area is under video surveillance, and that neither guns nor tobacco are allowed inside. As soon as I hop out to snap a few photos, a matronly woman in a security guard uniform popped out of the gatehouse. “Watcha doin’?” she asks conversationally. I give her my friendliest smile and tell her I am a journalist writing a book about sand, including about the importance of the quartz sand in this very facility. She takes that all in skeptically, and asks me to call Unimin’s local office the following Monday to get permission.
“Sure, I’ll do that,” I say. “I just want to take a look, as long as I’m here.” “Well, please don’t take pictures,” she says. There isn’t much to see—some piles of white sand, a bunch of metal tanks, a redbrick building near the gate—so I agree. She lumbers back inside. I put away my camera and pull out my notebook. That brings her right back out.
“You don’t look like a terrorist”—she laughs apologetically— “but these days you never know. I’m asking you to leave before I get grumpy.”
“I understand,” I say. “I just want to take a few notes. And anyway, this is a public road. I have the right to be here.”
That really displeased her. “I’m doing my job,” she snaps. “I’m doing mine,” I reply.
“All right, I’m taking notes, too,” she declares. “And if anything happens . . .” Leaving the consequences unspecified, she strides over to my rental car and officiously writes down its license plate number, then asks for the name of “my companion” in the passenger seat. I don’t want to get Biddix in any trouble, so I politely decline, hop in, and drive off.
Unimin guards its trade secrets fiercely. Whenever possible, vice‑president Richard Zielke recently declared in court papers, the company splits up the work among different contractors so that no individual can learn too much.
IF YOU REALLY want a sense of how zealously Unimin guards its trade secrets, ask Tom Gallo. He used to work for the company, and then for years had his life ruined by it.
Gallo is a small, lean man in his 50s, originally from New Jersey. He relocated to North Carolina when he was hired by Unimin in 1997. His first day on the job, he was handed a confidentiality agreement; he was surprised at how restrictive it was and didn’t think it was fair. But there he was, way out in Spruce Pine, with all his possessions in a moving truck, his life in New Jersey already left behind. So he signed it.
Gallo worked for Unimin in Spruce Pine for 12 years. When he left, he signed a noncompete agreement that forbade him from working for any of the company’s competitors in the high‑purity quartz business for five years. He and his wife moved to Asheville and started up an artisanal pizza business, which they dubbed Gallolea—his last name plus that of a friend who had encouraged him.
It was a rough go. The pizza business was never a big money‑maker, and it was soon hit with a lawsuit over its name from the E. & J. Gallo Winery. Gallo spent thousands of dollars fighting the suit—it’s his name, after all—but eventually decided the prudent course would be to give up and change the company’s name. The five‑year noncompete term had run out by then, so when a small startup quartz company, I‑Minerals, called to offer Gallo a consulting gig, he gladly accepted. I‑Minerals put out a press release bragging about the hire and touting Gallo’s expertise.
That turned to be a big mistake. Unimin promptly filed a lawsuit against Gallo and I‑Minerals, accusing them of trying to steal Unimin’s secrets. “There was no call, no cease‑and‑desist order, no investigation,” Gallo says. “They filed a 150‑page brief against me on the basis of a press release.”
Over the next several years, Gallo spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting the suit. “That’s how billion‑dollar corporations terrify people,” he says. “I had to take money out of my 401(k) to defend myself against this totally baseless lawsuit. We were afraid we would lose our house. It was terrifying. You can’t imagine how many sleepless nights my wife and I have had.” His pizza business collapsed. “When Unimin filed suit, we had just gotten over the Gallo thing. It was the sledgehammer that broke the camel’s back. We’d worked on it for five years. It was more than we could handle emotionally, psychologically, and financially.”
Unimin eventually lost the case, appealed it to federal court, and finally dropped it. I‑Minerals and Gallo separately countersued Unimin, calling its suit an abuse of the judicial process aimed at harassing a potential competitor. Unimin eventually agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to have the suits withdrawn. Under the terms of the settlement, Gallo can’t disclose the details, but says bitterly, “When you get sued by a big corporation, you lose no matter what.”
For all the wealth that comes out of the ground in the Spruce Pine area, not much of it stays there. Today the mines are all owned by foreign corporations. They’re highly automated, so they don’t need many workers. “Now there’s maybe 25 or 30 people on a shift, instead of 300,” Biddix says. The area’s other jobs are vanishing. “We had seven furniture factories here when I was a kid,” he says. “We had knitting mills making blue jeans and nylons. They’re all gone.”
Median household income in Mitchell County, where Spruce Pine sits, is just over $37,000, far below the national average of $51,579. Twenty percent of the county’s 15,000 people, almost all of whom are white, live below the poverty line. Fewer than one in seven adults has a college degree.
People find ways to get by. Glover has a side business growing Christmas trees on his property. Biddix makes his living running the website of a nearby community college.
One of the few new sources of jobs are several huge data processing centers that have opened up in the area. Attracted by the cheap land, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies have all opened up server farms within an hour’s drive of Spruce Pine.
In a sense, Spruce Pine’s quartz has come full circle. “When you talk to Siri, you’re talking to a building here at the Apple center,” Biddix says.
I pull out my iPhone and ask Siri if she knows where her silicon brains came from.
“Who, me?” she replies the first time. I try again.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” she says.
Afghanistan and Iraq (OEF & OIF)
Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) / Iraq: Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF)
Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States responded by deploying military personnel in Southwest Asia.
By January 2002, more than 30,000 active duty were involved and additional reserve personnel continue to be called to duty. As a result of Iraq’s refusal to comply with United Nations’ mandates, U.S. began deploying troops to the Gulf region in late 2002. Coalition forces subsequently won a decisive victory against the forces under the regime of Saddam Hussein, during April 2003, in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Coalition forces remain in Iraq today as part of ongoing peacekeeping/nation-building activities. Currently, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), U.S. troops are on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and neighboring countries of the former Soviet Union.
Read OnOEF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom
OIF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
Afghanistan - Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) On September 11, 2001 the United States of America was the victim of a series of suicide bombings. Nineteen members of a terrorist organization boarded commercial passenger airplanes, hijacked them, and subsequently crashed them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. Following the attacks, it was discovered that Al-Qaeda, an extremist Islamic militant group, was responsible for these acts of violence. Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist group’s leader, was rumored to be hiding in Afghanistan, where he trained and armed men to perform terrorist acts. While 15 of the 19 people accused of the hijackings were from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan was chosen as a battle ground because it housed many terrorist training grounds and was a meeting place for terrorists around the world. The United States government immediately responded to these acts of terrorism by giving Afghanistan an ultimatum.
The Taliban did not comply with the demands of the ultimatum and on October 7, 2001 Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) was launched. The stated goals of OEF became ousting the Taliban regime, which was harboring Al-Qaeda, capturing and prosecuting Osama Bin Laden and other leaders of Al-Qaeda, and permanently destroying Al-Qaeda’s organizational capacities. The first objective, removing the Taliban from governmental power, was easily accomplished by a joint effort of US and British forces. Also, several top leaders of Al-Qaeda have been found and either prosecuted or killed. The remaining goals have proved much more difficult because the nature of the warfare has turned to counterinsurgency. Since the Taliban was eradicated, a power vacuum has been created which is being filled by US forces and the International Assistance Security Force (ISAF). US officials fear that if they leave this power vacuum will be filled with counterinsurgents and Afghanistan will once again become a safe haven for terrorists.
The United States remains in Afghanistan, and is likely to remain until a strong central government, capable of enforcing stability, can be established. Iraq - Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) Iraq War The United States, with the aid of Great Britain, launched Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 20, 2003. Prior to the conflict there was speculation as to whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In 2002, The United Nations Security Council, demanded full access from the Iraqi government to ensure that they possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations found no verification of weapons of mass destruction when they searched Iraq, but evidence was said to be inconclusive. After OIF began, the search for WMD continued, but no such weapons were ever found.
Another justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom was that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaeda and coordinated the September 11th terrorist attacks with the organization. No evidence of a connection was ever found between Hussein and Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda. The last justification for the attack was that the people of Iraq were being oppressed by Hussein, and The United State’s goal was to free these civilians. Due to the controversial nature of the invasion justification, the Iraq war was protested against in many European countries. Despite the controversy surrounding the entrance into the war, the initial attack was very successful. With the help superior weapons, technology, and leadership the U.S. military, with the help of their British allies, quickly and soundly defeated the Iraqi military.
Saddam Hussein and his brothers went into hiding and Hussein was later found, tried, and executed. Once the official Iraqi military was defeated, insurgents began fighting U.S. troops who they felt were wrongfully occupying their country. Old religious tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims were ignited and violence continued. Iraq is still unstable and The United States remains in the country for purposes of security and nation building. U.S. officials want to make sure that the new Iraqi government will be capable of retaining stability and that the insurgents will not come into power when troops leave. Recently there has been improvement in the situation; the Iraqi government is taking increasingly more responsibility for security measures and daily governance. In 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama laid out a withdrawal plan, which would tentatively have U.S. forces out of the country by the end of 2011.
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Syria's civil war explained from the beginning
Read on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_WarOn 15 March 2018, the war entered its eighth year.
Situation Today
More than 465,000 Syrians have been killed in the fighting, over a million injured, and over 12 million - half the country's prewar population - have been displaced.
Here is how and why the conflict started:
What caused the uprising?
While lack of freedoms and economic woes drove resentment of the Syrian government, the harsh crackdown on protesters inflamed public anger.
Arab Spring: In 2011, successful uprisings - that became known as the Arab Spring - toppled Tunisia's and Egypt's presidents. This gave hope to Syrian pro-democracy activists.
That March, peaceful protests erupted in Syria as well, after 15 boys were detained and tortured for writing graffiti in support of the Arab Spring. One of the boys, a 13-year-old, was killed after having been brutally tortured.
The Syrian government, led by President Bashar al-Assad, responded to the protests by killing hundreds of demonstrators and imprisoning many more.
In July 2011, defectors from the military announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group aiming to overthrow the government, and Syria began to slide into civil war.
While the protests in 2011 were mostly non-sectarian, the armed conflict surfaced starker sectarian divisions. Most Syrians are Sunni Muslims, but Syria's security establishment has long been dominated by members of the Alawi sect, of which Assad is a member.
In 1982, Bashar's father ordered a military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, killing tens of thousands of people and flattening much of the city.
Even global warming is said to have played a role in sparking the 2011 uprising. Severe drought plagued Syria from 2007-10, causing as many as 1.5 million people to migrate from the countryside into cities, exacerbating poverty and social unrest.
Syria - The Roots of Tranny &
Foreign backing and open intervention have played a large role in Syria's civil war. Russia entered the conflict in 2015 and has been the Assad government's main ally since then.
Regional actors: The governments of majority-Shia Iran and Iraq, and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, have supported Assad, while Sunni-majority countries, including Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia supported anti-Assad rebels.
Since 2016, Turkish troops have launched several operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) near its borders, as well as against Kurdish groups armed by the United States.
Anti-ISIL coalition: The US has armed anti-Assad rebel groups and led an international coalition bombing ISIL targets since 2014.
Israel carried out air raids inside Syria, reportedly targeting Hezbollah and pro-government fighters and facilities.
The first time Syrian air defences shot down an Israeli warplane was in February 2018.
INSIDE STORY: A new flashpoint between Israel, Syria and Iran (25:00)
US and Russia
The US has repeatedly stated its opposition to the Assad government backed by Russia but has not involved itself as deeply.
Chemical red line: Former US President Barack Obama had warned that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a "red line" that would prompt military intervention.
In April 2017, the US carried its first direct military action against Assad's forces, launching 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air force base from which US officials believe a chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun had been launched.
One year later, on April 14, despite Russian warnings, the US launched an attack together with France and the UK, at "chemical weapon sites".
CIA training: In 2013, the CIA began a covert programme to arm, fund and train rebel groups opposing Assad, but the programme was later shut down after it was revealed that the CIA had spent $500m but only trained 60 fighters.
Russia's campaign: In September 2015, Russia launched a bombing campaign against what it referred to as "terrorist groups" in Syria, which included ISIL as well as anti-Assad rebel groups backed by the USA. Russia has also deployed military advisers to shore up Assad's defences.
At the UN Security Council, Russia and China have repeatedly vetoed Western-backed resolutions on Syria.
PEOPLE AND POWER: Syria - Under Russia's Fist (25:00)
Peace talks
Peace negotiations have been ongoing between the Syrian government and the opposition in order to achieve a military ceasefire and political transition in Syria, but the main sticking point has been the fate of Assad.
Geneva: The first round of UN-facilitated talks between the Syrian government and opposition delegates took place in Geneva, Switzerland in June 2012.
The latest round of talks in December 2017 failed amid a tit-for-tat between the Syrian government and opposition delegates over statements about the future role of Assad in a transitional government.
In 2014 Staffan de Mistura replaced Kofi Annan as the UN special envoy for Syria.
Astana: In May 2017, Russia, Iran and Turkey called for the setup of four de-escalation zones in Syria, over which Syrian and Russian fighter jets were not expected to fly.
After denouncing plans to partition Syria in March 2018, a follow-up trilateral summit was held in Turkey to discuss the way forward.
Sochi: In January 2018, Russia sponsored talks over the future of Syria in the Black Sea city of Sochi, but the opposition bloc boycotted the conference, claiming it was an attempt to undercut the UN effort to broker a deal.
Rebel groups
Since the conflict began, as a Syrian rebellion against the Assad government, many new rebel groups have joined the fighting in Syria and have frequently fought one another.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a loose conglomeration of armed brigades formed in 2011 by defectors from the Syrian army and civilians backed by the United States, Turkey, and several Gulf countries.
In December 2016, the Syrian army scored its biggest victory against the rebels when it recaptured the strategic city of Aleppo. Since then, the FSA has controlled limited areas in northwestern Syria.
In 2018, Syrian opposition fighters evacuated from the last rebel stronghold near Damascus. However, backed by Turkey, the FSA took control Afrin, near the Turkey-Syria border, from Kurdish rebel fighters seeking self-rule.
ISIL emerged in northern and eastern Syria in 2013 after overrunning large portions of Iraq. The group quickly gained international notoriety for its brutal executions and its energetic use of social media to recruit fighters from around the world.
Other groups fighting in Syria include Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Iran-backed Hezbollah, and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).
PEOPLE AND POWER: Western Jihadis in Syria (25:00)
The situation today
Fighting in Syria continues on several fronts:
Idlib: In February 2018, shelling by Russian and Syrian forces have intensified on Idlib, especially since fighters from the Hay'et Tahrir al-Sham group shot down a Russian warplane.
In April, Russia brokered a deal to evacuate opposition fighters from Eastern Ghouta in the south to Idlib in the north, Idlib being one of the few strongholds controlled by opposition fighters.
The province is strategically important for the Syrian government and Russia for its proximity to the Russian-operated Syrian Khmeimim airbase.
Homs: In April, an airbase and other Syrian government facilities in Homs became again the target of Israeli and US-led air strikes in which UK and French forces also participated.
The Syrian army recaptured the city of Homs in 2014, but fighting continues with rebels in the suburbs between Homs and Hama.
Afrin: Turkey and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) began in January 2018 a military operation against US-backed fighters in northwestern Syria, and announced the capture of Afrin's city centre in March.
US troops are stationed in nearby Manbij, prompting fears of a US-Turkey confrontation.
Syrian refugees
Now having gone on longer than World War II, the war in Syria is causing profound effects beyond the country's borders, with many Syrians having left their homes to seek safety elsewhere in Syria or beyond.
Registered: As of February 2018, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) had registered over 5.5 million refugees from Syria and estimated that there are over 6.5 million internally displaced persons (IDP) within Syria's borders.
Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan are hosting most of the Syrian refugees, many of whom attempt to journey onwards to Europe in search of better conditions.
The 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees describes a refugee as any person who, "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country".
Returns: In 2017, about 66,000 refugees returned to Syria, according to reports.
According to a Turkish official, 140,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey returned home after Turkish military operations in 2017. More refugees may return to Afrin.
Is the war in Syria really almost over?
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