I had planned on making a video about the sand in Cancún.
It's white, hydrophobic and it sticks to the skin.
I'd planned on telling you that it was composed of calcium carbonate,
that it's 62x more porous than the more common sand from Florida,
and that you call that a mesoporous material
whose filtration properties are studied for industrial purposes.
I'd planned on bringing back a sample of it and looking at it with a microscope.
But that's not what happened.
In doing research I found out just how much Cancún is in danger.
The sand I found so interesting is actually disappearing.
Cancún is a Mexican city known for its white sand beaches
along the warm, sun-soaked Caribbean sea.
This small peninsula accomodates tourists thanks to 27.000 rooms spread across 148 hotels.
Tourism represents 12.7 billion dollars per year.
The hotels compete to offer the most luxurious rooms right by the sea,
where you will be served your favourite cocktail while relaxing in the sun.
A touristic paradise.
The peninsula separates the lagoon from the sea by a stretch of 17km and only 500m across.
"The lagoon"
"The sea"
The lagoon is crocodile territory, so the hotels all gathered on the sea side.
They're huge since they have to welcome thousands of tourists,
and there's barely any space left for the beach on the one side,
and traffic on the other.
But the beach, which is what tourists come for,
is disappearing at a dazzling speed.
And it's partly the hotels' fault.
The thing is they're very heavy.
They sink deep into the unstable ground.
The waves hit against the solid hotel foundations,
bounce back and carry the sand away with them.
The hotels are also high and large.
Their walls keep the wind from blowing through,
so it gets redirected towards the ground where it blows the sand back into the sea.
There's also so many hotels that Cancún is now 'rigid'.
This means it can no longer adapt to climate constraints.
The lagoon and the sea are now hardly connected,
so much so that the lagoon water is starting to stagnate,
to smell bad, and to harbour destructive species.
On the sea side, storm surges are the main danger.
These surges are huge waves that look like tsunamis
and lead to floods, damages of all kinds and of course,
more sand loss.
If the hotels weren't there, natural breaches would create themselves
to connect the lagoon with the sea
and thus reduce the impact of the storm surges.
It's unthinkable to remain passive while watching these beautiful beaches disappear.
The authorities have been pumping sand out of the bottom of the sea to bring it back to the beach.
And yet, it all keeps going back to the depths of the sea.
Not any depth, though.
There's a coral reef off the coast of Cancún.
That's where the sand goes back,
keeping the light from reaching the corals and killing them slowly.
Corals are the home a 1/4 of all marine diversity.
But so what - at least we'll have sand beaches.
The economy is too dependent on tourism to give up on Cancún, so in 2010,
the authorities spent $70M bringing 3 million m3 of sand to the peninsula.
They had to save the local economy.
This large scale operation was necessary after Hurricane Wilma
brought disaster to Cancún.
Within one night, all the beaches were drained of their sand
and only had earth crust stones left.
7M m3 of sand was gone.
That's about 70,000 trucks like this one.
Between two sand deliveries, the hotels try to slow down the sand draining process by building physical barriers
in an attempt to delay the inevitable.
The hotels aren't the only ones to blame for the upcoming disappearance of Cancún's beaches.
There is one last reason for it and one which we all, as a species, share the blame for:
global warming.
The melting of the ice cap rises sea level by 2 to 3mm per year.
For each extra millimeter, one meter's worth of beach disappears.
Cancún, though it looks like paradise,
is an ecological disaster caused by mankind.