Featured Image Credit: Floris van Breugel
By Lindsay Edgar
A beach full of glass? Doesn’t sound like the sunny, relaxing spot that you had in mind.
BUT, what if we told you that the glass shards are more like small colorful pebbles, and their rounded edges won’t stab the bottom of your feet? What if we told you that from the moment you see these colorful beaches, it’ll take your breath away? On certain beaches all over the world, beachcombers flock to these spots to gather the little treasures and witness the sun reflecting off of the colors in the glass.
We can thank ourselves (not personally but figuratively!) for the existence of the glass beaches. Years before the colored pebbles arrived on land, humans discarded their glass bottles and other glass trash into the ocean. The waves then broke and tumbled the glass into smooth pebbles and deposited them on the beaches.
Some of the best spots to find sea glass are located on the United States’ coasts: Fort Bragg Beach and Del Monte Beach in California, Kauai Island in Hawaii, and Spectacle Island in Massachusetts just to name a few! Some top-rated sea glass beaches lie outside the U.S: Russia’s Ussuri Bay sparkles with orange, green, and turquoise glass pebbles. Bermuda also makes the list.
These beaches are a fortunate result of nature’s power to transform human negligence into beauty. So, grab your shovel and head to a glass beach this summer! You won’t regret it.