Evaluation

No single environment stood out from the results of the investigation, but this was definitely not due to human mistakes in processing or taking in data for the sands the results we got just didnt lead to a definite conclusion due to the methods used. Unavoidably there will have been inaccuracies in taking in data, most of the grain size distribution tables started with around 100g, and by the end most had lost a small amount of sand in the process or shaking and measuring, but the lost amount was almost always under 0.5g, a tiny amount which would have make little difference to any other values because the values for Skewness, Sorting and Kurtosis were produced from reading values off a graph to the nearest 0.05. One of the main issues we had was simply not getting helpful result from the mathematical functions we used. The graphs for Kurtosis led to contradicting results for multiple environments, rendering them useless, because we couldnt give that environment a definite typical Kurtosis reading to compare to the Dawlish sample. Both the Skewness and Kurtosis also had environments without a definite trend, so they were also not always as useful. The reason for these I cannot be sure of, some samples may just have been unrepresentative of that environment, or the method of producing mathematical functions may not actually give useable results. If I was to repeat the experiment, I would make sure I had a lot more sand samples having only two samples for each environment in some cases was not enough to highlight trends or show anomalous data. With more sand samples I could then work out an average range of Skewness, Sorting and Kurtosis, and see which samples were not representative of an average sample of that environment. The perfect example of an anomalous sand, which gives data very different from an average sample from that environment, was Mannin Bay. Mannin Bay is a beach made up of pieces of broken coral; almost all were the equivalent of a very large grain, verging on gravel. This meant that its cumulative frequency graph had almost all the sand in -1 which played havoc with the values for Skewness Sorting and Kurtosis, because on most of the sums it resulted in either having -1 on the top or bottom of a fraction. Luckily, I had more beach samples than the others, so I could ignore its results and not treat it as an average beach sample but other samples may have had anomalous sands and wouldnt have noticed. Not all data didnt lead to productive conclusions though; the triangular composition graph showed most environments had a region where they bunched together the only problem was there were normally a few sands that occupied the same area. This make the graph useful for discounting sands that it definitely couldnt have been, but not for singling out specific definite environments. Other issues with the experimental method came from some sands very similar nature. Sands from very different environments can have similar characteristics, e.g. both shell sands had Skewness, Sorting and Kurtosis results to Dawlish, so if I didnt have all the other data and analysis that proves Dawlish could not be a Shell Sand, I could have concluded very wrongly. The overlap in characteristics for some sand types is very large, so it was vital as many experiments were done as possible, to distinguish between the sands using slight differences. This, again, is where having many more samples would have helped massively. To conclude, I still think it is possible to identify an unknown sand by method of comparison with sands of known environment, you just have to have a suitable amount of samples to compare with, and make sure you investigate as many different characteristics as possible.