Dust particles can carry quite a hefty cost

Dr. Lowman’s latest Nature’s Secrets column in newsobserver.com:

Our daily lives are surrounded by billions of unwelcome aliens that constantly engulf us, and yet we know next to nothing about them. They are technically the product of aeolian (wind-driven) processes, and are called “dust.”

Dust is everywhere – sprinkled onto our food, inhaled into our lungs, caked on car bodies and vegetation – and sometimes they obliterate the horizon when drought or fires create enormous clouds of particles. The cost of dust is enormous – everything from car washes, to asthma medication, to expensive construction that attempts to seal buildings, to irrigation systems minimizing loss of topsoil.

During the 1930s, the Great Plains experienced one of America’s most severe environmental catastrophes. With the Dust Bowl, accelerated agricultural cultivation combined with a dry spell led to significant increases in wind erosion, and an estimated 800 million metric tons of topsoil simply blew away. The loss of topsoil is expensive, and from that several-year event, approximately 222 million acres of farmland were degraded.

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