Florida is a 447-mile-long peninsula that possesses the longest tidal coastline in the lower 48 states. Incredibly, Florida has more miles of sandy beaches than California. As the crow flies, Florida claims 1,800 miles of coastline, and 1,100 miles of that are sand beaches. When all the undulations around bays and inlets are figured in, Florida’s shoreline totals 8,462 miles.

Because the state is bounded by water, Florida can be said to have several coastlines: the East Coast (facing the Atlantic Ocean); the Keys (extending into the Straits of Florida); and the Gulf Coast (on the Gulf of Mexico), which includes Florida’s West Coast and Panhandle-not to mention the interior elbow know as the “Big Bend.”

Florida is largely fringed by long, narrow barrier islands. It is coastline more influenced by waves than tides, making it conductive to the formation of sandy-beached barrier islands and spits. On the Panhandle and the northern peninsula of Florida, the quartz sand is fine-grained and white. Further down the peninsula, the sand is brown and composed of shells, Out on the Keys, crushed enters inot the equation. Unfortunately, many Florida beaches are no longer natural, since they have been “renourished” with sand dredged from offshore- a procedure necessitated by beach erosion due to human interference with sand-deposition processes. In wake of Florida’s recent run of hurricanes, the entire state has become on big beach-renourishment project.