The Very Dust, Part 5

those first so you get the flow. But honestly, I think this series is a little bit less narrative in format than some of the other ones we've done, So if you start with this one, I don't think it makes a huge difference.

about the relationship between atmospheric dust and climate. In Part two, we talked about dust bunnies inner and outer, including dust bunnies in space, and we talked about how historical attitudes toward dust had changed over time, changing ideas in hygiene and things like that affecting interior design in the nineteenth century.

In Part three, we talked about the role of dust in urban Victorian London and in the novel Dracula, and we also talked about the Sororietys paradox also known as the paradox of the heap, using dust accumulation as an example. And in Part four we talked mostly about select examples of dust having interesting significance in myths, rituals, and beliefs about magic and alchemy. And now we're back for more.

So I think in the final episode of this series we are going to focus primarily on dust storms.

house or somebody walking by to send some dust flying. However, if conditions are right, when winds become stronger, even particles larger than the normal flying dust threshold can be picked up and carried in the air, and this can result in dust storms, also known sometimes as sandstorms, also known in some instances as a haboob, which is a term that comes from from Arabic and sort of refers to

a particular type of dust storm. For some people, especially people in very arid climates, dust storms might just be a regular part of life, you know, a thing that you get used to, especially in certain seasons of the year.

But if you're unfamiliar with them, or if you are experiencing a dust storm at the extremes of size and intensity, dust storms can be frightening, all inspiring natural events, turning up massive, surging clouds of dust and soil so powerful I've seen them described as land based tsunamis that once they envelop you can blot out the sun and cause a kind of midnight at noon. And to illustrate what a dust storm at the extreme of intensity and the

surprise factor can be like. I just wanted to mention a couple of descriptions of and facts about a particular dust storm that hit the Great Planes of the United

States on April fourteenth, nineteen thirty five. This is a day that came to be known as Black Sunday, named after the storm, and with historical perspective, this particular storm on April fourteenth came to be seen as part of a larger pattern of drought and dust storms in the prairies of the central United States that stretched throughout the nineteen thirties and is known as the dust Bowl. And

dust storms were very frequent during the dust Bowl. But the US National Weather Service actually has a great information page on the Black Sunday storm which collects some quotes from eyewitnesses and contemporary news reports, and they are fascinating and harrowing. So this storm was very large. It swept across multiple states through the middle of the United States, but it seems that the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma

got the worst of the effects. The storm in this region sort of began in mid afternoon around four PM and stretched on into the evening and according to the National Weather Service summary, in some places winds reached sixty miles per hour, and in certain parts of the storm it was as dark as night or even.

Kansas called Liberal. It's the name of the town. It says, a great black bank rolled in out of the northeast, and in a twinkling when it struck, Liberal plunged everything into inky blackness, worse than that on any midnight when there is at least some starlight and outlines of objects can be seen. When the storm struck, it was impossible to see one's hand before his face, even two inches away, and it was several minutes before any trace of daylight

whatsoever returned. Then I got another passage. This is written by someone named Pauline Winkler Gray, writing a piece called the Black Sunday of April fourteenth, nineteen thirty five for the Kansas Historical Society. This author right, it was as though the sky was divided into two opposite worlds. On the south, there was blue sky, golden sunlight, and tranquility. On the north, there was a menacing curtain of boiling black dust that appeared to reach a thousand or more

feet into the air. It had the appearance of a mammoth waterfall in reverse color as well as form. The apex of the cloud was plumed and curling, seething and tumbling over itself from north to south, and whipping trash, papers, sticks, and cardboard cartons before it. Even the birds were helpless in the turbulent onslaught and dipped and dived without the benefit of wings as the wind propelled them. As the wall of dust and sand struck our house, the sun

was instantly blotted out completely. Gravel particles clattered against the windows and pounded down on the roof. The floor shook with the impact of the wind, and the rafters creaked threateningly. We stood in our living room in pitch blackness. We were stunned. Never had we been in such all enveloping blackness before, such impenetrable gloom.

Trillion Particles by Jay Owens, published twenty twenty three. This book has a chapter which talks about dust storms, drought, and the dust bowl, and the author here relates an eyewitness telling by a woman named Ada Kerns talking to the Oklahoma Historical Society about Black Sunday many years later, and she claims that she's listening to the radio and suddenly the radio announcer had to cut in and say we're going off the air, and gave no explanation why, so,

Owens writes about this quote, no time to say why. The storm carried so much static electricity that it was shorting out electrical equipment and car engines. Barbed wire fence is visibly glowed with charge. The storm front rolled southward, picking up more dirt and power as it went. The sky filled with birds racing ahead, The ground ran with jack rabbits. The dust storm rolled along the horizon, inexorable and terrifying, a wall of oblivion.

a song that was possibly inspired by this event. The song is known as Dusty Old Dust or so long It's been Good to know you and has some lyrics about dust storms that I'm gonna say, I love Woody Guthrie. This song, the vibes of it do not quite convey the terror and intensity of these quotes.

phenomena that happen often in our surroundings. But if you are not used to the idea of a dust storm, as I certainly am not, it seems just an overwhelming experience. So Rob I did attach a few photos we can look at that managed to in various contexts capture the dust wall boundary like of an advancing dust storm, and it looks just shocking, you know. There's like it's like mountainous dark clouds just pouring over the land.

looking up. If you just do an image search for dust storms A Z, you'll get some pretty tremendous looking images and some footage as well. And yeah, there's just a very apocalyptic appearance to these things, just a massive wall of dust rolling in, you know, blotting out the sun, turning the world red or gray in the shadows. I'm

glad I've not had the experience firsthand. I'm sure we have listeners out there who have been through these many times, and perhaps you can write in and share your experiences with us.

have collisions in an aircraft or ground based vehicle. It's just better to avoid it, obviously if you're flying, but if you're in a car stop, you know you don't want to be trying to weave your way through the darkness at noon.

help you prepare for it. You know, you can put tarps over things, and you can take measures to try to avoid getting in trouble in a dust storm. But for lots of people around the world. It's just a regular part of life. So why don't we get major dust storms around where we live? It has to do with climate. So this is going to raise general questions about how do dust storms work, what actually causes them,

and where do they form. So I was looking at a number of sources on this question, and a really good one I came across is what do you know? A good old house stuff Works article by Vicky Jugo, Rob and I. If you're newer to the show, never heard us talk about this before. Robin I used to work for How Stuff Works. Seeing still see the stuff and the title of the podcast there.

local climate conditions, as you might expect it. Dust storms are most like in places where the top soil is loose and dry, so places where the ground is wet or where the soil is firmly crusted together are going to release fewer particles into the air when the wind kicks up, so obviously less likely to create a dust storm. These conditions of dry, loose top soil are most common

in arid regions, especially after a period of drought. In fact, water helps protect the soil from erosion in multiple ways. It directly physically helps bind the soil by getting it wet and making it compact, you know, helping it clump together. But it also nourishes plant life, and the plants in

turn help protect against soil erosion in many ways. So plants help bind soil and hold it in place with their roots, but plants can also serve as wind breaks which slow down the wind that might blow away the top soil. Can also help prevent water from washing away soil when rain does fall, so dust storms are most common in deserts and semi arid lands. You can think of dryness and drought as triggering a kind of vicious cycle of loss of plant life and subsequent soil erosion,

and soil erosion can give rise to dust storms. The process by which fertile and semi arid land is gradually degraded into full desert is known as desertification, and the house Stuffworks article here mentions one particularly notable case of relatively recent natural desertification. Because there's some desertification that's caused by human land use practices, certain types of agriculture and stuff like that, but there's also natural desertification, just as

the climate of regions changes over time. And the natural example mentioned in this article is a place called the Badeleai Depression. So the Badeleai Depression is a sandy dry basin at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, centered in the northern half of the country of Chad. Today it's a relatively low lying desert region, but about seven thousand years ago it was the location of a vast

freshwater lake known to scientists as Lake mega Chad. Lake Megachad covered more than four hundred thousand square kilometers, which is larger than all of the Great Lakes of North America put together.

So I got a little bit interested in this, and I found a paper by Washington at All published in Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences in two thousand and nine called dust as a tipping element the Bdella depression chad and this paper suggested that the Badelea depression, this one single area is the source of about half of the mineral aerosols that come from the whole Sahara desert, and these mineral aerosols and dust from the Sahara more

generally are very important for spreading supplemental mineral nutrients to the Amazon region. You may have read or seen about this before, that there's a cross oceanic current of dust through the atmosphere where this dust is lifted up off of the Sahara goes across the desert some goes into the Caribbean basin. I think some goes into the Amazon, and the nutrients that are in this dust are very important for sustaining the Amazon rainforest.

it pick up. Well, here's another fascinating thing to consider. The dust picked up from the depression here is made

in large part of fossilized life. The sand in the former lake bed is made significantly of diatamite, also known as diatamaceous earth, which is a type of sedimentary rock usually soft in texture and light or white in color, and diatamite is formed over time from the fossilized body of diatoms, which are single celled organisms usually classified as the type of algae which live in the water and

in the soil. They can sometimes gather together in colonies, and diatoms build protective cell walls or shells for themselves out of silica silicon dioxide, and after they die, the remains of these silica shells form a layer of sediment that can later become exposed and then become sand or dust.

So the silicon dioxide shells of these tiny algae organisms living in the water so long ago become the dust that is blown across the ocean that helps nourish the Amazon rainforest, but also is used in everything from gardening to home construction to whatever I mean. Diatamacious earth is a commonly used material for all kinds of human industry, and it's just all the skeletons of these little dead life forms.

and soil through the air becomes more violent. And one important process to understand here is something called saltation. The saltation as in related to Spanish word saltar, meaning like to jump. So when wind blows across loose, dry soil on the large scale, you will observe particles behaving differently based on their size. Very small dust particles can be picked up and become suspended in the air for long periods of time and can go very very high up.

As we talked about in Part one, small particles of dust can float for hours or even days, and a dust storm can loft these small particles into a cloud, reaching hundreds of meters or thousands of feet into the air. Larger particles can be blown across the surface of the ground, sort of rolling in a process known as creeping, that's the term. But there are medium sized particles, these sort of sandy particles that engage in saltation, and saltation again

means jumping. So these medium particles get blown along the surface of the ground until they are briefly carried aloft by lift. Maybe they hit an uneven surface and jump up as they're blown along, and then they bounce back

down and hit the ground. And this causes a chain reaction because they come back down and they hit the ground, and that impact can cause other particles of soil or sand or whatever in the ground to bounce, to be knocked out of place, and they jump and then hit other particles and on and on, kind of like splashing

in the water. So when a heavy wind hits dry soil, there will be a cloud of fine dust blown in the air by the air currents, but also a bombardment of leaping medium sized particles nearer to the ground.

of dust and soil. Apparently, the ground becomes in simplified terms, the ground becomes positively charged and the flying dust particles become negatively charged, and this electric field helps lift more particles off the ground and helps the flying particles in the air lift even more particles up. So it's not just the force of the wind, it's the static electricity within the dust storm that helps make it even more violent and lift more matter off of the ground into it.

lifted into the air. And then this dust blizzard is brought at the advance of a thunderstorm. So often after certain types of dust storms, like after a haboob, it will rain. Sometimes it won't be a lot of rain, but a rain can follow a dust storm. So it's like looks like rain is coming, but at the edge of the storm here comes a terrifying black wall of

dust and sand miles long and thousands of feet high. However, to move on to a slightly different topic, Rob, I know you wanted to talk a bit about dust devils, and so we should establish a distinction between dust storms

and dust devils. A dust storm is usually used to refer to like an advancing wall of dust driven by outflow of winds from a weather pattern or from a thunderstorm, while a dust devil is a smaller, more contained event, but can be very striking in its own right, because a dust devil is a type of whirlwind.

five hundred to one thousand feet. They typically last only a few minutes, though it is noted that in desert environments like those of northern Arizona, they can reach heights of several thousand feet and last for an hour or more. Wind speeds can reach sixty miles per hour or so. You can think of them they're kind of like tornadoes, except they're smaller, often much smaller. They can still provide

a certain amount of destruction. They can still impact things, but not generally to the degree that you would associate with a full scale tornado. I was reading more about them in an article from Rob mccorkyle, an article that this is on Texas parks in Wildlife. This is a twenty twelve article that's mostly dealing with legend, lore and

legacy titled Ghostly Little Twisters. I'll come back to some of the tidbits that he includes here, but he also sums up some more about the formation of dust devils. The ideal conditions, he said, are a clear day with sunny skies, light or no wind, cool atmospheric temperature, and a flat bear in terrain and key. Here is a

difference between near surface air temperature and atmosphere. So, as the NOAA article summarizes on this point quote, if the temperature of the ground becomes much warmer than the air above it, a vertical mixing will take place to release this unstable configuration. Once the ground heats up enough, a localized pocket of air will quickly rise through the cooler air above it. The sudden uprush of hot air causes the air to speed horizontally inward to the bottom of

the newly forming vortex. So whila, you get this vortex of spinning dust. Because there's ample amounts of dust around in the sort of regions where these things tend to form. Again, these are generally not that long lasting, and they'll continue until this careful balance is broken. Generally speaking, that's once the warm, unstable air is depleted, and he points out there most of these are mostly considered harmless, but there

are documented cases where they have caused harm. There's some story about one hitting a bounce house, for example, so they can get a little out of hand, but generally speaking are not considered like a major risk. They're generally seen as more of a curiosity.

such things. Already touched a little bit on Navajo traditions about different types of winds in the previous episode, but I found this this one interesting concerning dust devils potentially in Celtic mythology. According to the Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore by Patricia Monaghan. This is from twenty fourteen. Dust devils were connected to the idea of fairy blast or fairy wind, by which the fairy folk took things

from our world. And you could dislodge something from the dust devil by throwing a shoe or some other object into it. But if you manage to take something out of it, if you knock something out of this dust devil that was not of human origin but was a fairy origin, a magical item of some sort, like a superb musical instrument of fairy craftmanship, well then you only have it for a short amount of time because it will later turn to dust in your hands.

devil whips up a storm on Irish beach. And there's some like, you know, some some local footage that somebody just snagged on the beach of one of these dust devils. So you don't have to have a desert environment necessarily for one of these things to form, and then you don't have to ultimately have that many of them or them have them occurring that frequently of course, to enter

into folklore tradition. Now, Rob mccorkyle and that article Ghostly Little Twisters points out a few other traditions from around the world. Basically, there are various takes on the idea of a dust devil as a supernatural entity of one form or another, a ghost or a spirit, some evidence of the activity of the fairy folk, that sort of thing, and it may range from something rather harmless to something

actively nefarious. So a few bits here he writes quote to the Navajo, dust devils are Chindy ghosts or spirits of the dead members of their tribe. Their tradition holds that a Chindy spinning counterclockwise is a bad spirit, while one spinning clockwise is a good spirit. He also adds quote in African folklore, a dust devil is a noom, a shape shifting demon or sorcerer, occupying the body of a human host and drawn to suffering and self destructive

souls unconsciously seeking relief from the pain of their lives. This, of course, instantly brings to mind the Richard Stanley film Dust Devil, which is one we might have to come back around to on Weird House Cinema. It's been a while since I've seen it, but it has one very memorable dust related sequence in it.

And then also we see Aboriginal Australian traditions depicting the willy willy, a kind of nursery bogie that you would use to as with other bogies and boogeymen, to frighten children, essentially to tell them you need to behave otherwise or you be on the lookout because the willy willy in this case may come for you.

are more on the scale of like dust storms. But you know, whenever you have some sort of a weather phenomenon that you can sort of witness as a thing that is moving, you know, and as opposed to something you are in the midst of entirely we can't help but then anthropomorphize it and see it as kind of a being or an entity on some level, like even if you know better, you know, you can't help but think of that that tornado as like a stalking entity out there in the in the sky, you.

as he was writing this. Okay, all right, we're going to go ahead and close the book on dust. But that doesn't mean you can't write into us with your own tidbits experience learnings about dust, dust in your world, dust in different cultures, dust and literature and so forth. We're already getting some excellent listener mail on this count, and we will discuss these in future installments of Listener Mail, which publishes on Mondays. In This Stuff to Blow MND

podcast feed our core science and culture episodes. Those are cround Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short format, and on Fridays we set aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.