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Hawaii's Green Sand Beach
Don't Adjust Your Sunglasses, the Sand Really Is Green!
By Jenn Director Knudsen
As the Big Island Visitors Bureau media liaison, John Kitchen sometimes photographs sights around the island for a CD distributed to the media and other organizations promoting the largest of the Hawaiian islands.
He said he shot some good ones of Green Sand Beach, located on the hardscrabble, windswept tip of South Point, the southernmost spot of the island and, at 19 degrees north latitude, of the entire United States. But not one of those pictures is featured on the digital promo.
"Truthfully, [the bureau] didn't want to encourage people to go there," says Kitchen, who lives in Wisconsin.
Intrigued?
Unlike some so-called black sand beaches whose tiny granules seem closer to gray than jet, Green Sand Beach's sand truly is green.
Known in Hawaiian as Papakolea Beach, Green Sand Beach's twinkling, S.O.S.-pad green sand gets that color from waves pulverizing a semi-precious mineral called olivine. The crystals are a common component of lava flows from Mauna Loa, one of two active volcanoes on the island.
But what is uncommon is that the green hue would be revealed at all.
"The Green Sand Beach is in fact an anomaly," Kitchen says.
Normally, powerful ocean waves crash against the lava rocks, turning them into billions of grains of black sand, according to Kitchen. By contrast, Green Sand Beach was created by the Pacific Ocean ruthlessly hammering the black lava, leaving behind a finite deposit of the heavier, olivine crystals.
It is an awesome sight to behold, and the green sand feels thicker than most; walking barefoot along the quite secluded, crescent-shaped beach is like receiving a caressing foot massage. But certainly do not approach Green Sand Beach in the Big Island's Ka'u District sans footwear, and flimsy sandals or flip-flops will not suffice for the journey there.
