A thick dust cloud formed in minutes, engulfing part of Interstate 55 (Illinois’ main thoroughfare between St. Louis and Chicago), creating a blizzard-like whiteout on May 1. I was. The driver braked hard, but not fast enough. Car after car crashed, killing seven people and leaving 72 of his cars miserable on both sides of the highway.
For such a tragedy to occur in the Midwest, a full storm of factors would have to come together, said Chuck, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who tracked the impressive wall of dust in satellite imagery. Shaffer says. In this case, just after a farmer had plowed the field near the interstate, a straight wind blew across the field near the interstate, leaving it unusually dry for weeks without rain. loosened the topsoil. Dust storms are rare in Illinois because this combination of conditions rarely occurs. But researchers warn that storms like this could become a serious problem across the Great Plains and Midwest due to climate change and the impact of an expanding agricultural industry. That concern has led some scientists to consider whether the heart of the country is tumbling into a new Dust Bowl. , caused unprecedented dust storms and devastated agriculture.
“These were storms that eroded hundreds of millions of pounds of topsoil and spread dust all the way to New York City,” said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist who specializes in surface change and drought at NASA’s Goddard Space Institute. I’m here. Intensified agriculture, plowing prairies to plant corn and wheat, helped drive the first Dust Bowl, Cook showed in his study. We have taken major steps to improve practices that were degrading our soil. Farmers now rely heavily on irrigation to manage dust. But experts say today’s conventional farming practices still put soil at risk.
“Conventional farming practices are very aggressive,” says Evan Thaler, a Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher who specializes in soil erosion for agriculture in the Midwest. I plow a lot of fields in the winter and what happens is that the soil becomes really nice and fluffy and prone to erosion by water and wind.” stay. Thaler and his colleagues calculated that over the past 160 years, his third of the dark topsoil that made the Midwest famous for agriculture has been eroded.
Agricultural impacts on dust have also become more prevalent. In a recent study, University of Utah atmospheric scientist Gannett Haller and her then-graduate student Andrew Lambert found that between 2000 and 2018, atmospheric dust levels across the Great Plains increased by 5 per year. % increased. twenty years. This increase is consistent with the area that farmers converted from grassland to cropland during that period. Dust concentrations were highest during spring planting and autumn harvest.
And agriculture continues to expand. Policies to promote biofuel production will force farmers to convert even less productive land to grow corn for ethanol, which creates more dust, Haller said. says. In Illinois, called the “Prairie State,” only one-tenth of his percent of the prairie that held the soil together for centuries remains. More broadly, less than 4% of his original tall grasslands in North America still remain uncultivated. Even land returned to the prairies through the USDA’s Conservation and Preservation Program (CRP) has been returned to farmland. “It’s more profitable to grow poor-performing crops in marginal areas compared to what the USDA pays for his CRP land,” he says.
Climate change may be exacerbating the dust problem in some places, as changing weather patterns reduce precipitation and high temperatures dry out soils quickly. “Much of the western United States has experienced near-continuous drought for the last two decades,” says Cook. There and on the Great Plains, “if we see a continued increase in aridity and drought, as is expected with climate change, the atmospheric dust load will start to increase further.” We are actively studying dust hotspots near highways in the Southwest, and have identified the Great Plains and Midwest as areas to watch out for.
While the West, Southwest, and much of the Great Plains are drier under climate change, Illinois is generally becoming wetter with more frequent heavy rain events and localized flooding. It’s set. Yet the amount of garbage continues to grow. Hallar’s data show that the south-central region of the state where the May storms hit is about 2% more dust per year. This shows the role agriculture is playing there and holds governments accountable for promoting better farming practices, Thaler said. One of the ways he keeps dust down is no-till farming. This uses certain planters to dig seeds into the ground in small furrows, eliminating the need to till the soil. Another one is the cover he’s cropping. This involves planting crops such as oats and hairy astragalus during the winter to keep the fields from being bare or exposed.
“Combining these two methods has been shown to reduce erosion by as much as 95 percent,” says Thaler. It’s possible Congress will include incentives for sustainable farming practices in the Farm Bill, which is due to be renegotiated this year, but Thaler isn’t confident that will happen. It’s all about policy,” he says.
Encouraging such practices and continuing irrigation could prevent a dust bowl on the scale of the 1930s disaster, Cook says. Haller agrees. “I would say that this is an emerging trend that we are really concerned about,” she says. “Will it get as bad as the Dust Bowl?
