About me

My name is Siim Sepp. I am a sand collector from Estonia. I have collected sand since october 2009. I am interested in geology and for several years I have collected different types of materials our home planet is made of. I had nobody to exchange this stuff with and it was never really a very active hobby.

It changed rapidly when I discovered that there are number of people who collect sand and exchange samples to enrich each others collections. It really sucked me in immediately and after two months I already had a collection of 300 samples.

I have a bachelor’s degree in geology from University of Tartu. I work currently as a science journalist. I live in Southern Estonia with my wife and children. Bedrock around my home is composed of orange sandstone from Devonian period.

English is foreign language for me. I don’t use my mother tongue Estonian language here because it would be useless. As far as I know, I am the only sand collector who understands Estonian. Please let me know if this is not true!

Contact info

Easiest way to contact me is to send me an e-mail.

I am willing to talk about many things besides sand trading as I am interested in many topics. I love to communicate with interesting people from other countries. The way they think and understand the world around us has always fascinated me.

My home address:

Siim Sepp
Partsi, Põlva vald
63217
Estonia

Some of my sand friends have expressed doubts that this address can be valid. Where is the number of your house? Well, there is really no such thing. I don’t have it. I live in Estonian countryside. Every household has a name which is often hundreds of years old. But I don’t need to use that too because postman knows every person by name. This is something that makes living here in sparsely populated nordic country worthwhile.

Sandatlas

Sandatlas was launched in November 2009. All HTML and CSS files of the first Sandatlas version were handwritten in Notepad. I was very proud of it but needed something simpler and more powerful. I eventually decided to start using WordPress blogging software. Second and current version of Sandatlas started in February 2010.

Sandatlas has several purposes. I do it mostly for myself. It is simply fun to create something. It is also a good way to offer additional information to my tradelist. It is really difficult to pick sands from tradelist which contains nothing but location only. This website is my way to show what information would be helpful for a sand collector like me.

Although I do provide general mineralogical overview of my sand samples, I can’t guarantee its correctness. I am not mineralogist and I have no access to sophisticated analytical tools needed to unambiguously determine minerals identity.

Photos

I make my photos with SLR Camera Canon EOS 450D. Photos of sand samples have a width of view of approximately 2.5 cm.

Copyright

All photos and text in this website belong to me. It is not allowed to use them in any way without asking my permission. However, if you wish to use my material for educational or other noncommercial purposes, just let me know. I will grant you the right to use my material, it is no big deal. I just wish to know by who and where it is going to be used.