Mildly Interesting

Uh what? I mean we can get geochemistry and look for trace elements.

Paleontologists will absolutely look for fossils in sand, they do it all the time. I just sent off a bunch of sand and clay for pollen analysis and I'm not sure how they process it but I know it involves dissolving inorganic material in acid sometimes.

Most of the time no one looks at sand in bulk. It's...you can imagine, a daunting task. Sometimes people (individuals) will look at sand for some diagnostic purposes - usually in my line of work to note the type and abundance of minerals present, or especially the distribution of particle size and clay/silt content. I know other fields will survey things like diatoms and foraminifera for paleontology but also for I think oil exploration because indicator fossils are important but I don't do that so I'm not really sure I can speak more to it.

A lot of time people look at sand in the field with a hand lens or drag it back to the lab to look at it with a basic microscope. Or slap it in epoxy and make a thin section. Sending it off for geochemistry is...possible but may not be especially illuminating depending on what you're trying to learn. People can also date the sand using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to get a date of when the sand was last exposed to sunlight (and thus, deposited) if the sand is in the right age bracket (<150ka ish).

Rarely people get more involved with things like XRD/XRF, SEM, microprobe uh.. something else, I'm sure. That's more of a straight academia realm though.

I went off on a tangent but people slap sand in machines and other things to find out stuff all the time.

Reached out to the photographer!