A Textural and Mineralogical Study of the Beach Sands Between Talapady and Surathkal, Karnataka

The beach sediments are medium-sized sand, unimodal, well-sorted to mode-rately sorted, nearly symmetrical and mesokurtic to leptokurtic in terms of their grain size distribution. The sand-silt ratios are very high. The content of heavy minerals is very less compared to the content of light minerals and there is an appreciable percentage of shell fragments. The heavy minerals commonly found in these sediments in the decreasing order of abundance are opaques, garnet, zircon, hornblende, actinolitetremolite, sillimanite, enstatite, rutile, pyroxene, spinel, epidote and kyanite. The percentage of quartz in the light mineral fraction varies from 68 to 99. The provenance of these beach sands is the Netravati river basin of Western Ghats largely consisting of Precambrian granitic gneisses.