France

More than 80 years after D-Day, traces of the Second World War still remain in the sand.

In 1988, two geologists scooped a jar of sand from Omaha Beach. They were not looking for the war. The sand was meant as a reference sample, and the beach looked like any other tourist beach.

Under the microscope, about four percent of the sand in the jar turned out to be shrapnel. Among the grains were also tiny beads of iron and glass, formed in the extreme heat of explosions.

Salt water slowly eats away at the iron, and the fragments are shrinking. But later samples have found wartime metal grains in sand from all five landing beaches.