Sand is a hot commodity these days. As construction booms in Asia and the Middle East gulp up billions of tons of sand each year, beaches thousands of miles away are getting robbed and turned into rocky, pockmarked versions of their former selves, according to an October 6 article posted on Gizmodo Australia.

"It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in the past 25 years," Robert Young, a coastal researcher at Western Carolina University tells Der Spiegel. "We’re talking about ugly, miles-long moonscapes where nothing can live anymore." Laura Höflinger writing for Der Spiegel visited Cape Verde, where men and women armed with shovels descend on the beaches during low tide. "From a distance, it looks like gophers have dug their way through the beaches, with piles of sand stacked up, still dark from the wetness, "she writes, "And there are several pits, some as deep as two meters." This is a scene repeated all over the world, in Kenya and New Zealand and Jamaica and Morocco.