Dust storms — and their lingering effects — can be hazardous for several reasons : A dust storm’s initial wall of dust and debris can arrive suddenly and can catch people by surprise. Dust storms can make it difficult to see when you’re driving a car and can lead to car accidents. Dust in the air can cause serious problems for airplanes.
How do dust storms cause desertification?
When dust storms kick up in agricultural dry lands that are degraded, they remove the topsoil, which causes further desertification. As a result, farmers are forced to watch the topsoil, and their livelihood, literally blow away. This cycle, if gone unchecked, threatens to displace whole communities in some regions.
During major dust storms, the deposition of dust over populated areas can be wide reaching, often affecting multiple cities and towns. Dust storms can take down trees, bury equipment and cause damage to houses .
How deadly are dust storms?
Those strong winds whipped up dust in central Utah and then the unthinkable happened: Eight people died in chain-reaction collisions on I-15 involving at least 20 vehicles.
One inquiry we ran across in our research was “How bad were the dust storms of the 1930s?”.
There had never been dust storms like these in prior droughts. In the worst years of the 1930s on as many as a quarter of the days dust reduced visibility to less than a mile. More soil was lost by wind erosion than the Mississippi carried to the sea.
Why is there so much dust in the atmosphere?
This is primarily due to the increased number of storms originating from areas of desertification. The dust in these storms has been shown to contain pollutants and toxins, such as salt, sulfur, heavy metals, pesticides and carbon monoxide to name a few [sources: United Nations, Stewart ].