Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Land, and I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be kicking off a series about the topic of dust. I came to this one along a quite literal route. I was recently cleaning out some boxes that I had stored in a closet for years, and in the process stirred up a bunch of dust and then I just sat there breathing it while I was going through all my old stuff trying to figure out what to get rid of and all that. And
this process greatly irritated my airways. But through the irritation, I ended up thinking a lot about dust and about what dust means to us. So we're surrounded by dust all the time. You know, it's in all of our homes, and it's a major concern of simple cleanliness and hygiene in the house. But it's also of huge significance to the natural environment, to cycles of weather and water, and it is of great significance to our health. Dust has
so much influence on our lives. And yet it's interesting that when you think about the way dust imagery is used in like, you know, metaphors and poetry and mythology and all that. It seems to me that what dust is most often used to symbolize is uselessness, worthlessness, meaninglessness, things of no lasting significance.
Yeah, I was. I picked up a Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and fable, just looking up dust and seeing what kind of like maybe old antiquated terminology and sayings might be invoked there. And sure enough there was one for referring to money as dust, which I had not run across before. Like the idea of being like it's money, it's ultimately worthless, and therefore you call it dust.
Vocabulary in that way is like a talisman against the power of money.
Yeah.
Yeah. Examples of this kind of usage of dust meaning that which is worthless, meaningless, you know, of no lasting significance. These go back to ancient myths and religious literature. But one of the most famous examples that came to my mind is in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's the Quintessence of Dust monologue in Act Too Seen To where Hamlet is talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he says famously what a
piece of work is a man? How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, How like an angel in apprehension, how like a god? The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals? And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? So the final thought there is kind of the negation of everything he said beforehand, all of the amazing powers of humankind or beauty, or the way in which we are made in the image of God.
According to Hamlet, ultimately mankind is as worthless and meaningless as the dust from which it was made. And this betrays a kind of running theme of obsession with physical death, which sort of neutralizes all meaning and renders everything pointless. I guess when Hamlet is in his depressive moods.
Yeah, I mean, there's of course the line in the Bible, the King James version being for dust thou art, and unto dust, thou shalt thou return, which you know, is pretty on point, but I think it also misses all of the dust in between, because it will be discussing
like dust is just so ubiquitous. It's not just like that thing at the beginning of the end, like it's everywhere in between two, Like it's in the living body, it's brought into the living body, it's in the living world, and it's out there in the cosmos.
Oh yeah, well that's kind of a beautiful observation. I like that counterpoint that, of course life in many ways is dust. There is a dust of life in the same way that there is a dust of death. But I also still think that it's intriguing and curious that there's so much literature and poetry and stuff where the image of dust seems to emphasize almost cosmic horror, you know, the great vast emptiness and negation of all of life's
grandiose illusions of worth, Like why is that? What is it about if you look at a pile of dust? What is it about a pile of fine, granular particles of matter that takes on such a powerfully depressing symbolic heft.
Yeah, fear and a handful of dust.
Right, So, I guess a good place to start for the series is to tackle the question quite literally, what is dust in a physical sense? And I found that in scientific usage, the stuff that we call dust is often broken down with more specific terminology depending on the field. But I did find a book actually that gave what I thought was a really good definition of dust generally. So I came across this because I was reading an interview in Wired magazine with an author named Jay Owens.
She's the author of a twenty twenty three book called Dust The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, and I like the author's thoughts, so I ended up buying the book to explore the topic more. And by the way, this book isn't purely about like the science of dust. It delves into politics and religion and philosophy and so forth. But in terms of a physical definition, the definition of
dust the author uses is tiny flying particles. This is sort of a compromise that works across multiple domains, and personally, I think it works quite well because it captures the three main properties common to all the things we call dust, so tiny flying particles. First, we look at particles, meaning pieces of solid matter. In the atmospheric sciences, people often talk about the idea of aerosols, meaning particles or droplets that are suspended in the air, like suspended within a gas.
But this includes things that obviously aren't what people mean by dust, such as floating liquid droplets like mist or fog, and many types of air pollution contain a mix of liquids and solid particulates. But in common usage, I think dust means a substance made mostly of solid particles. Right. Second element of tiny flying particles we can look at tiny.
There is no universally agreed upon size for dust particles, but based on reading Owens and other sources, it seems that what we call dust is always made of particles less than a millimeter in diameter, and usually on a scale of one hundred to one thousand times smaller than a millimeter, which means between one and ten micrometers or microns in size. So again, a micrometer is one one
thousandth of a millimeter. And for comparison, Owen's notes that human hair is on average somewhere between seventy and ninety micrometers in width. So if I did the math on this, right, what we call dust is usually somewhere between one percent to about fifteen percent the width of a human hair.
Right, So very often the particles of dust we're talking about, they're not even really visible to the human eye. Though again you're going to have some particles that are larger than.
Others exactly, and they're things that are often not visible on their own but are visible in aggregate.
Right. So like when you walk in and you decide to sit down at your hobby table, I don't know, your typewriter, whatever air of your house is beloved but perhaps neglected, and you say, who put all this dust here? You know you I can think of it in terms of who put all of these dust particles here on my hobby table? You know it's you see it again in aggregate, like you said, and how did they get there? Well, that goes right into your next point, right, So.
The third part of Owen's definition tiny flying particles is flying. So a core element of dust is that dust particles can easily be stirred up by airflow and other types of physical agitation, and then they float in the atmosphere
for a significant time before settling down. So you might think of, say, grains of sand on the beach as tiny particles, but a lot of those grains are large enough that if you grab a fistful of sand off of beach and you throw it up in the air, those grains of sand will plummet straight back down to
the ground. However, some of the mass of that fistful of sand will probably be made up of dust sized particles which will remain in the air as a cloud for some time, while the larger grains just fall to the earth. So a characteristic feature of dust is its ability to float in the air but also to travel on the air. So this made me think about how when you see a surface in your house, so maybe a bookshelf in dust, you don't look directly above it
to see where the dust was falling from. Maybe you do if you see larger pieces of something on top of it. But if it's just dust, we understand that dust migrates on currents of air and it settles somewhere potentially very far from its origin. So it doesn't just fall, but it travels. So that's the rundown of Owen's definition, and I think it's a good one. Dust is made of tiny flying particles. But there's another sense of the question what is dust? And that sense is what is
it made of? And this is another interesting point that Owen's race is. In the introduction of her book, she argues that dust is also defined by quote A certain loss of context, an inherent formlessness. And that might sound maybe overly poetic, but I think that's actually a quite good specific point. It's the fact that dust is made of many different substances and we don't know what they are,
and that is what makes it dust. Because if we did know exactly what it was made of, and we saw it, say, pouring in fine floating grains from its original source, we probably wouldn't call it dust. We would call it whatever it was. We might say, look, that is oak pollen, or that is pet dand or floating off of my dog, or that is silica powder coming out of a container, or it's you know, concrete dust coming up off of a concrete being mixed in a bucket.
It is the loss of its original context and the mixing together with other such substances lost from their original context, to that blending together that makes these unknown particles simply dust.
Yeah, it's only in the Hollywood context that you have a definite source of dust. I was looking around at some of these gadgets earlier. You can pick up like a handcrake dust gun for pretty cheap, and then you have you know, far more advanced models as well. Where you would actually have the dust particles inside of a reservoir and then you are spraying them out onto a surface.
So you know, you can get that like nice haunted manner layer of dust so that your lead actor can come in, you know, perhaps drag their finger over the surface of a piano and then look around at the haunted surroundings. But then you have to do another take and spend several minutes like removing all the dust and then apply reapplying the dust. I've heard accounts of that sort of thing in movie production before.
Now, what about when the actor who's like been through a lot, like you know, they're coming in out of the desert or something and they pat themselves and the dust comes off of them in a cloud. I wonder do they have to get redusted again each take?
I bet so. I mean there's all sorts of I mean, it's kind of the reverse of the whole like having to polish Darth Vader's helmet, you know, constantly to make sure sure that you're not getting any smudges on there or anything. But yeah, you're interested in the cinematic dusting. Yeah, you can go to various websites and you can look up the movie dust. You can buy it in various sizes, various instruments to to spray the movie dust around.
It's kind of fun, okay.
So dust is the name for tiny flying particles from an unknown source. But when we actually get in there with the microscope and the lab equipment, we of course can study dust and figure out where it comes from and what it's made of. So what is dust most often made of when we encounter it? Of course, it
depends where you're taking the sample from. Worldwide, Owen says the most prevalent type of dust is mineral in origin, so tiny grains of rock broken apart by natural processes or worn down by erosion, and you know they come from the rocks, the rock layers of earth, and these minerals are born aloft by winds and other primarily by winds,
but by whatever source agitates them. Inside a home, a lot of the dust you will find still does come from soil tracked in or blown in from the outside, but there are also non soil particles carried in from outside, including pollen and particulates in the air that come from combustion, such as soot. Soot can be a big constituent of dust. Also soot from any combustion happening inside the house. Cooking in the house is a large source of particles inside
the air of a home. But also there are, I don't know, depending on your point of view, perhaps grosser sources of dust, but hair from humans and pets, dead skin cells from humans, as well as pet dander, you know, stuff coming off of the skin of pets. There are fibers from inorganic sources in the home, fibers from carpets, furniture, and clothing, other organic particles like pieces of dead insects,
wonderful little cockroach crumbs all over the house. And then just you know, random stuff, tiny bits of random garbage like pieces of paper, waste, and plastic.
This episode is brought to you by dusting. Have you dusted today? Don't you want to? Now?
Oh, let me give you another reason, because among all that, there is something else, some part of the dust itself which is alive and feeding and growing and living amongst us always, and that is dust mites. I got really interested in dust mites for this episode, so I wanted to do a little sidebar here on dust mites. So there are many types of mites. House dust mites are one particular branch of them, belonging to the family pyro glyffidy.
And I was trying to parse the name. That name through its Greek roots pyro is fire and glyphid would seem to mean like carving. But then I found a source saying exactly what it means. And the name of the pyroglyphid mites comes from the fact that these dust mites can cause irritation on the skin, rashes and irritation on human skin, like burns from fires, like fire carvings on the skin. So house dust mites are microscopic bugs that can be found all throughout human dwellings. They are
They're not insects. Instead, they are eight legged arachnids, more closely related to spiders than to insects. They are microscopic and can possibly be seen without the aid of a microscope, but would rarely be noticed without visual magnification. Their body lengths are on the order of a few hundred micrometers. So these dust mites are in many human homes, living all around us. How do these dust mites make a living?
What are they doing in our homes? You might be able to guess that by knowing the genus name of a couple of the most common varieties of house dustmites. That genus name is Dermatophagoides skin eaters. They are skin eaters generally dead skin that is already flaked off of your body, so fortunately you know, usually they can they can find something that's not still attached to you.
Polite skin eaters they.
Hunt for these discarded rafts of mammal skin in the microforests of our homes, in carpets, mattresses, in the soft weave of furniture. But despite their tiny size and the fact that they're usually looking for stuff that has already fallen off of you, house duestomites and their feces are a major problem for humans. They are a major source
of allergens within the home. In fact, according to one paper that I'm going to get to in just a second, pyroglyphid mites are the single greatest source of allergic symptoms in human beings.
Total.
The authors of the paper estimate that they cause allergies in somewhere between sixty five million and one point two billion people.
This episode is also brought to you by washing your sheets. Have you washed your sheets lately, don't you want to?
Now, I want to clarify that these are these are different than bedbugs, by the way, Yes, yeah, dust mites. I mean they'll they'll find them all over the place. They're not the same as bedbugs. You know, bed bugs are looking for a blood meal. The dustimites are looking for the skin flakes. Now here's maybe a good point to describe what they look like, Rob. I've attached some pictures of dustimites for you. These are several micrographs of pyroglyphids. So what do you see here?
I mean they basically look like the head crabs from the old Half Live video games.
That's perfect, That's exactly it. Yeah, one of these. So some of these are like scanning electron micrographs. I guess that. You know, they're a lot of texture. It's false color, I guess. But in the one shown from right above, I mean they've got a bit of a spidery appearance because they have eight legs and these you know, the these mouth parts up in the front, the kind of finger fangs sort of. But also one of these big pictures we have to look at, the skin just looks
kind of like wrinkly and deflated. It's like a half inflated basketball.
Yeah yeah. I'd also like how the wrinkle on this particular image looks kind of like a mouth, So it kind of looks like some sort of a whiskery Muppet creature, like from like a nineties Muppet creature, not a classic Muppet.
Oh, it looks exactly like either the Nightmare Before Christmas, the Oogie Boogieman, or looks like the sorting hat from the Harry Potter movies.
Yeah.
Yeah. The really magnified images I have for you are the the false color images, but the ones in true color you can see that they're generally kind of white in appearance. Again, they're very very small, so hard to see with the naked eye, but kind of white and a little bit grub like in appearance, with the limbs coming out in the front in a larger sort of
white bulb of a body extending behind. Now, I wanted to come back and take a brief look at a dust mite paper that I just brought up a minute ago. This is a paper called is Permanent Parasitism Reversible Critical Evidence from early evolution of house dust mites. This is by Pavel B. Klimov and Barry O'Connor published in Systematic Biology in twenty thirteen, and there are a couple of
things I wanted to talk about here. First is just a passage directly about the allergenic quality of these mites, about why the feces of pyroglyphid mites are so prone to cause irritation and allergic reaction in humans the author's right quote. Dust mites feed on organic debris such as shed skin and flourish in nests of vertebrates, including human dwellings.
The mites severe allergenic properties are linked to their powerful digestive and molting enzymes, salivary secretions, and other water soluble molecules. For example, large quantities of digestive enzymes accumulate in mite's fecal material, minute particles that can easily become airborne when inhaled or in contact with skin. The residual mite enzymes may break up tight junctions between epithelial cells and trigger
allergic reactions. So these mites they make tiny poops, and their tiny poops are full of the digestive enzymes that they use to break down their food, and their food is human skin flakes and in the broader context, things that contain keratin, like of course skin cells, but also like bird feathers, which these animals also eat. So it is like they have evolved a digestive enzyme that makes it possible for them to eat difficult to digest things that fall off of us and get nutrition out of that.
And then they poop, and their poop contains the enzymes that allow them to break that stuff down. And then that poop gets stirred up in the air and becomes part of the dust in our homes and gets on
people's skin and in their airways and so forth. But anyway, to come to a bigger picture issue, the real point of this paper is related to the evolutionary history of the house dust might how did these microscopic animals end up living this way, crawling through the jungles of the couch cushions, you know, getting into the area rug to munch on our dead skin flakes. How did they end
up that way? Well, the authors of this paper used genomic evidence cross comparing different lineages of mites of these pyroglyphids and related organisms to show that these free living mites within our homes. It used to be even closer companions than they are now. They evolved from fully obligate permanent parasites of warm blooded vertebrates like birds and mammals the author's right quote. We propose that parasitic ancestors of
pyroglyphids shifted to nests of vertebrates. Later, the nest inhabiting pyroglyphids expanded into human dwellings to become a major source
of allergens. So these evolved from creatures that were once free living organisms and then evolved a tight specialized parasite relationship with warm blooded vertebrates like mammals and birds and would live directly on the host, and then shifted away from that tight specific parasitic relationship to be to have a more loose relationship, to be free living into somewhat, you know, to sort of scavenge what falls off of
the host animal or the former host animal. And that's interesting because this kind of despecialization from a tight parasite host relationship to a more generalized free living dust no mad lifestyle was considered quite unusual, something that is rarely observed in evolution, and at some times in the past
was thought impossible. But it's clearly not impossible. It's just evolutionarily difficult to do to get out of that sort of tight, tight adaptive dead end where you are stuck in a relationship with this host animal to become a little more of a generalist and get a little bit more distance and still be able to survive.
What's like, it's almost like evolutionarily they survive the passage to the promised land, the promised land being the augmented environment that is the human home.
Oh that's interesting. Yeah, I mean they have to they still have to be very specialized to survive within the human home. They have to be able to tolerate different kinds of environmental conditions than they would if they were living directly on the on the mammal or the bird body. Like,
they have to be able to tolerate less reliability. And I think I think one of the things is they have to be more resistant to dehydration, you know, because like it's harder to get water when you're just living in the dust.
Uh.
They have to have these digestive enzymes that allow them to break down difficult foods like the keratin and skin skin cells and stuff like that. But apparently they got all the right adaptations, and now they're here. Now they're living in the in the couch cushion.
Yeah, it's my understanding that humidity is key. You look around and you see various advice about dust mites in the home, and like some some people advise having a dehumidifier, for example, trying things out a bit, and then on top of that, of course washing sheets and so forth to appropriate temperatures, and some people advocate like putting I guess in cases where you don't have time to do this and you're dealing perhaps with you know, some sort
of a more severe allergy to them, putting bedding in the freezer for a certain amount of time and then removing them.
Oh interesting, I guess that would really dry it out.
Yeah, and then I guess then you've got both sides of the pillow or the cold side of the pillow, so wind win.
Okay, that's all I've got on dust mites for now, but we may come back to them later in the series and.
They may re emerge for sure. Now, for the rest of this episode, I wanted to talk a little bit more about atmospheric dust, which we've already touched on. We've talked about the ways that the dust is floating around. It's stirred up easily by just movement and through the atmosphere that we all live in, or of course by by weather patterns and so forth. We've talked about how you know, an individual particle of dust is often invisible to the naked eye, but in great volumes it's different.
And that great volume may be the great volume of dust on your dining room table when after you come back from traveling, or it could indeed be the great volumes of dust seen in a dust devil or seen in a dust storm. Because again, dust is everywhere suspended in the air, It's steadily accumulating on surfaces, and we often don't notice it until it builds up to a certain threshold.
This is why it never seems like you need to dust until it's already too dusty.
Yeah, yeah, and at that point you realize you live in foul and you've got to fix things now. Atmospheric dust is important because, of course it impacts both human health and climate, though of course these two topics overlap. Dust, according to the NAA, is the single largest component of the aerosols in Earth's atmosphere. It likely has a huge impact on Earth's climate and affects everything from oceanic temperatures
to snow melt rates. There also seems to be a connection between dust and hurricanes, with data points to an inverse relationship between dust in the North Atlantic tropics and various Atlantic hurricanes. I was looking at a few different
sources on all of this. One in particular, there's a NAA article from twenty sixteen titled the Dirt on Atmospheric Dust, and that twenty sixteen stat is key because a little later I'm going to touch on some research that raises the question about like where we are in terms of
our modeling of atmospheric dust and so forth. But based on this source, it says that we're looking at somewhere between two hundred and five thousand terograms of dust entering the atmosphere each year, with one teogram equaling one trillion grams.
My kitchen scale does not go up to a terogram.
There's also an estimated twenty terograms of dust suspended in the atmosphere at any given time, with seasonal variations. Now, the amount of time that an individual dust particle remains in the air that depends on particle size. Apparently, larger particles may remain suspended for no more than like twenty four hours, but much smaller particles, they can say, aloft much longer than the period of time that the NAA mentions in this article is twenty days or even more.
Now another figure I ran across. This is from Robert Monroe's Increased atmospheric dust has masked power of greenhouse gases to warm planet from January twenty twenty three. This was published on the website of the Script's Institution of Ocean Oceanography, and it puts it like this quote, twenty six million tons of such particles globally equivalent to the weight of about five million African elephants floating in the sky.
I came across some numbers within the same range offered in the introduction to Jay Owen's book. So in the Dust Book, she includes estimates that somewhere between and this is a big range, but no matter what, this is a huge number. Somewhere between eight and thirty six million metric tons of mineral dust are floating in the atmosphere at any given time, And I was trying to come up with a comparison for that number. Looking for figures
in that range. One I found was kind of interesting, not that it's all that easy to picture this, but just as a conceptual comparison, I found a paper published in PNAS from twenty twenty three by Greenspoon. It all called the Global Biomass of Wild Animals, And so the authors of this paper were just estimating for certain categories of animals and organisms on Earth how much total biomass is there if you were to weigh them all at
the same time. And the authors, based on their methodology, estimated that if you were to put together all of the wild land mammals on Earth, so all the mammals that are not domesticated live out in the wild on land, there would be about twenty two million metric tons worth, and a lot of those animals are going to be things like deer, wild pigs, elephants, and so forth. There would be about twenty two million metric tons worth. And by the way, that number is quite small compared to
the total biomass of humans. There would be three hundred and ninety million metric tons of humans and six hundred and thirty million worth of domestic and city dwelling animals. But all of the wild land animals are about twenty two million metric tons, which is sort of in the middle of Owens's eight to thirty six million metric tons of dust range. So that's a lot of dust in the air. It's kind of hard to imagine.
Yeah, yeah, And again part of it is because it is just mostly invisible to us, and even when it's visible, it's hard to think in terms of, oh, that dust devil, that dust cloud, even if you're looking at satellite Maybe when you're looking at satellite imagery you can sort of think in terms of millions and millions of elephants. Now, the next question you may ask in a number if you already know the answer to this, I'm sure, is where does the dust come from? On the whole, it
comes from the deserts. So according to again the NOAA and twenty sixteen, more than half of the world's atmospheric dust originates in North Africa. This is the Saharan connection that you've probably heard of, with the greater Saharan desert dust transport across the Atlantic having been linked to things like El Nino and other weather phenomena. So that's like half the dust more or less based on these measurements
and estimations and models. The rest is thought to originate from other major desert regions around the world that share the right characteristics.
Well, what are those characteristics?
All right? So these are areas that sit in low elevation basins near or surrounded by mountains, and the mountains are key because these feed rivers, which deposit vast amounts of sediment into low lying regions. So that makes these regions dust collecting and distribution engines for the atmosphere. Okay, now we should also point out that there are other major dust engines, certainly if you have wildfires we mentioned
so earlier, but also volcanoes. Right when a volcano erupts, we've talked about this on the show before you know, injects injects of vast amounts of volcanic dust into the atmosphere, and these injections are often large enough to impact human health and human activity to varying degrees, and these are often visible from space.
So we've seen how the creation of atmospheric dust in some way depends on the complex interactions of other cycles and processes on the surface of the Earth, like the interaction of the water cycle and of water coming down from mountains and mixing correctly with the with the desert environments, and then of course that being affected by wind which raises dust up into the air. So but it also works on the other end too, right, like dust in turn affects complicated processes all around the globe.
That's right again. You think of like the various you know, convection and system of movement of air throughout our atmosphere, and just imagine dust getting caught up in all all of that, you know. So, yeah, atmospheric dust has a few properties worth stressing in relation to climate and weather. Here. On one hand, there's the role played by dust particles
in the formulation of water droplets. So these form when water vapor shifts to liquid form around a condensation nucleus such as a particle of dust, and then these particles of dust with water condensing around it, these coalesce into clouds. And then all of these particles with water around these water droplets, they fallows rain, and this whole cycle continues. And if you've ever absorbed any material about how rain drops work and so forth, you've probably heard about this.
So to some extent, dust quite literally makes it rain.
Yeah, and then there's the fact that atmospheric dust can have both a apparently both a cooling and warming effect on the planet, and temperature of course plays a vital role in climate and weather as well. But the exact net effect of dust warming or cooling this seems to remain a complex topic of discussion. But one of the people that has been studying this as looking at stuff that this person has said and written and also articles
about their work. This is Jasper Cock, a UCLA Assistant Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic sciences, and according to Cock, here dust can have either a net cooling or net heating effect on the atmosphere, depending on the size of the particles. Ah okay, so in the cooling scenario in recent studies may point it seems and coxingstandicate this as well to a slight overall cooling effect. You have dust particles reflecting sunlight back into space and also dissipating high
clouds that warm the planet. Now on the warming side of the whole scenario, dust landing on the surface of the planet again, it can coat your car, it can coat your dinner table, and so forth. But it also can coat snow and ice with dark particles that increases the absorption of heat.
Ah Okay, that's right. So if it was just pure snow or ice, it would reflect more of the Sun's energy back out into space. But if you cover it with something darker in color, it will just warm it up, right.
And Cok has also pointed out that dust can also cool the planet by depositing key nutrients like iron and phosphorus into the ocean to support the growth of CO two absorbing phytoplank Then, so you know, there are all these different ways that dust interacts with climate, and it seems like they're warming properties that can go on, they're cooling properties, and it may be that it's a little more in the cooling category at least right now.
But if I understand you right, you're saying that that's there's enough uncertainty there that that's sort of a low confidence conclusion.
There's the more that I look at it, the more that it seems like we're still learning a lot more about how dust were in the atmosphere and exactly like what our data sets are and what the modeling looks like. But coxmin point here, and this is reflected in the Monroe article. I referenced earlier, is that this is not an argument for Okay, this is what we need to do to combat climate change or reverse it or the reverse of this. You know, It's not some sort of
like weird biohacking geo hacking scheme or whatever. But rather it's about identifying because we we've probably discussed some of these before and you run across these where it's like, all right, what we need to do. We need to pump x number of particles how many tons of particles into the atmosphere to carry out some sort of cooling effect to counteract global warming.
That is not being advocated here right.
Rather, the point here is that we need to identify to what degree atmospheric dust levels may impact and even mask the effects of global warming. And its key since microscopic airborne particles created by burning fossil fuel or of course a huge aspect of human caused climate change, but those very particles could also temporarily be contributing to cooling.
So we need to be aware of all this so that first of all, we know the degree to which you know to which climate change is occurring and isn't masked by the effects of the dust in the atmosphere, and then also we need to be aware of this. If we do hopefully ratchet down on our fossil fuel consumption, you know we're likely going to see some sort of dip in the cooling effect. There that there were the specific cooling effect caused by the dust particles that are
created via the burning of fossil fuels. Now, satellites can detect dust in the atmosphere, but I was reading about how this doesn't mean it's necessarily always easy to detect. It can apparently be quite challenging, but the results can also be very impressive, very informative. Apparently there's still a lot of discussion over how how much dust there is and how it impacts everything. I was looking at a twenty twenty four article in The Washington Post by Aaron Blakemore.
This is not a pair of recent studies that challenge the North African dust emission dominance view that we referenced earlier, and instead argue that dust emissions may vary by season and across hemispheres, and that the total worldwide dust emission level might actually be much lower than previously thought. So that would mean our older models may be in need of some update, and I believe the issues we've just discussed your concerning climate and fossil fuel usage. I mean,
these are still extremely valid. But this is another example of how we need more research. We need better data sets, better tracking. All this is probably needed to get a handle on the exact impact and variance of Earth's atmospheric dust.
So, despite common symbolic themes, on a global scale, dust is the opposite of insignificant. It has large scale ramifications and we need to understand them better. In how dust affects climate, weather, water, all of that.
Yeah, human health, and then you know, to get into the dust mites as well, allergens and so forth. Yeah, so it's like dust at the beginning, dust at the end, and then just dust all in between as well, you know, making it rain, making it hot or cold, making us sick, making us feel like our house is a bit foul and needs to be cleaned up, all of these things.
All right, Well, maybe we should call part one there, but we will be back with more to say about dust next time.
That's right, there's a lot to discuss regarding dust. We didn't get into cosmic dust at all. I'm sure we'll get into that We already have some topics lined up involving, you know, philosophical and mythological treatments of dust, so expect more of that as well. In the meantime, I'll remind everyone that Stuffed Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On my days, we do listener mail. On Wednesdays, we
do a short form episode on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. And indeed, more than one movie we've watched quite a few movies have involved evil creatures turning to dust. I think we just watched one a couple of weeks ago where this happened at the end. Which one was this was this Wolf Woman where the villain turns to dust and then a wind suddenly blows all the dust away.
Yeah, Wolf Devil Woman. Yeah, the evil demon at the end turns into soot.
Yeah. So there's plenty of dust on Weird House as well.
And then it doesn't tell you if the main character lives or not. She just like is getting kind of woozy, and then the cuts to the end the end.
Yeah, so yeah, that's the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feet and hey, just remind everyone out there if you like what we're doing here. One thing you can do to help us out is rate and review us wherever you get the you have the power to do so. Give us a nice array of stars, a little sprinkling at dust there if you will, it helps us out. And if you know, if you have any thoughts on this topic about past topics, future topic possibilities, ride in
and let us know. We would love to hear from you, and email is the best way to get in touch with us directly.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.