Earth Equity News

A Global Dust Bowl. By Michael Tennesen, Discover, August 26, 2010. "Blowing dust and brownout conditions on January 19, 2009, created a chain reaction of fatal crashes on I-70 in eastern Colorado. In July a massive dust cloud descended on Iraq, forcing the police to wear masks while directing traffic through the strangely dark streets of Baghdad. In September one of Australia's worst dust storms in 70 years clogged the skies over Sydney with 5 million tons of particles, causing international flights to be diverted and prompting a spike in emergency calls from people who were having trouble breathing. And such disruptions can take on a global dimension. Satellite images show storms in northern Africa blowing particles all the way to the Amazon Basin. Plumes from northern China can reach Hawaii and California. A 2002 dust storm from the Gobi Desert tracked east across the Pacific Ocean, past the United States, and out into the Atlantic. The problem has been building for a long time... Hence dust is both symptom and cause of a grim type of environmental decline: desertification, the degradation of vital grasslands into barren and unproductive desert."