They called it Black Sunday. The most catastrophic dust storm in US history brought mayhem to six states, from Nebraska in the north to Texas in the south.
Ferocious winds picked up an estimated third of a million tonnes of dusty topsoil and transformed it into a black blizzard.
Residents of Dodge City in Kansas reported the arrival in mid-afternoon of a colossal inky cloud, some 200m high, that turned day to pitch-black night within seconds. As the sun was blotted out, the temperature plunged from 29°C into the low teens, and visibility reduced rapidly to zero.
The immense deathstorm plagued an area of around a million square kilometres and took hours to blow itself out. In its wake, it left wasted fields of destroyed crops and the bodies of livestock, half-buried homes and barns, and the dead – either suffocated outright or succumbing to dust pneumonia (pneumoconiosis) brought on by dust-choked lungs.
The Black Sunday storm occurred over 90 years ago, on 14 April 1935 and was emblematic of the so-called ‘Dust Bowl’, which left many destitute or homeless and brought devastation to huge tracts of the American prairie.
Now, as dust storms become increasingly common in the US, some are wondering if it might happen all over again.
Deadly dust
During the 1930s, these dust storms could become deathstorms due to the sheer amount of dust they moved. It accumulated in attics caused ceilings to collapse. The build-up of high-voltage static electricity in the storms was electrocuting people in their cars.
Neither of these are an issue today, but dust-related health problems, like the pneumoconiosis that took lives on Black Sunday, remain. University of California researcher, Estrella Herrera, who works on the impact of dust on health, has found that hospitalisations can increase fivefold after a Texas dust storm.
“Breathing in high levels of particulate matter floating in the air can lead to inflammation of different parts of the body and exacerbate a wide range of health problems a person may already have,” said Herrera.
Young children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing conditions, like asthma and bronchitis, are especially at risk from dust inhalation.
The finest particles can even get into the bloodstream and the brain, raising the risk of heart issues and strokes. In sub-Saharan Africa, just a 15 per cent rise in the level of fine dust particles in the air has been linked to the infant mortality rate jumping by a quarter.
Worse still, dangerous bacteria or fungal spores can piggyback on dust storm particles, which can then spread them far and wide. Across the Sahel, south of the Sahara, high levels of dust are strongly correlated with incidences of deadly bacterial meningitis, defining a meningitis ‘belt’ that stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east.
In the US, there has been a huge uptick in occurrences of a fungal infection known as Valley Fever, and dust storms have been fingered as the cause. The illness, which often presents similarly to bronchitis or pneumonia, can last for months and is sometimes fatal. Valley fever is endemic to the dry and dusty southwest, but it is being diagnosed increasingly often in other parts of the country.
A number of pieces of research have linked a rise in the occurrence of the infection with dust storms, suggesting that spores in the soil are picked up and dispersed far beyond their source, but there is, as yet, no robust evidence for such causality.
Nonetheless, the hotter, drier, dustier conditions brought by global heating are widely thought to be playing a role in pushing up the infection rate across the whole country, which increased tenfold between 1998 and 2011. The illness is already claiming victims in Oregon and Washington State, and is predicted to spread to the Midwest and into Canada in the coming decades.
Ground zero
At the heart of renewed dust storm activity in the US are the drought states of New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.
In 2025, the city of El Paso in Texas, experienced the most dust storms since the 1930s, following two years of record heat that resulted in the further loss of vegetation and soil moisture. This coincided with the country as a whole experiencing its windiest early spring on record.
To the west, New Mexico endured 50 dust storms in 2025, one of which spawned a dust cloud that extended all the way to the east coast and into the Atlantic.
In August of the same year, a fast-moving wall of dust slammed into Phoenix, Arizona, grounding flights and cutting power to 40,000 homes.
Beyond the drought region, the mid-west state of Oklahoma – once at the epicentre of the Dust Bowl – saw a combination of strong winds, dust storms and wildfire smoke lead, in March last year, to extremely poor air quality and the declaration of a state of emergency.
And there is no sign that things will improve. On the contrary, prospects for a less dusty future are poor.
A new study of past drought conditions across the southwest United States, published in the journal Nature, suggests that global heating could lead to them persisting to the end of the century and quite possibly far beyond.
Timothy Shanahan, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-author of the paper, warned that: “water managers need to start planning for the possibility that this drought isn’t just a rough patch – it could be the new reality”.
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Huge economic cost
Dust costs money – and lots of it. For example, sand and dust storms cost North Africa and the Middle East an eye-watering $150 billion (£112 billion) every year.
While dust storms can be devastating to the lives and livelihoods of those residing close to the great deserts of Africa and Asia, their economic impact is greatest in developed countries with complex infrastructures.
In the US, the cost of wind erosion and dust in 2017 is estimated to have cost the economy an extraordinary $154 billion (£115 billion), four times higher than an estimate for 1995, and it would be reasonable to think that it has gone up again since.
This huge cost arises from the widespread negative impacts dust has on both arable and livestock farming, air and surface transport, power and communications networks, and health. Damage caused to US homes and gardens by blowing dust alone, in 2017, totalled an astonishing $40 billion (£30 billion), while the price of road traffic accidents due to poor visibility during dust storms added up to $250 million (£187 billion) in the same year.
Dust also added $4 billion (£3 billion) to the nation’s energy costs in 2017, in particular due to its impact on renewable energy; the gritty air made wind turbines less efficient, while dust-covered solar panels produced up to 30 per cent less power.
Dusty planet
These destructive dust storms, and their close relatives, sandstorms, are becoming more frequent right across the planet. The reason: persistent and intensive drought conditions made worse by global heating, alongside poor land and water management.
Something like 80 per cent of the global dust budget comes from the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, but around 330 million people across 150 countries are now affected by dust and sandstorms. An estimated two billion tonnes of dust and sand – equivalent to the combined volume of more than 300 Great Pyramids of Giza – now routinely floods the atmosphere every year.
Dust, as we know from personal experience, gets everywhere. In a big enough volume, and driven by powerful winds, it is all-pervasive and highly disruptive.
As Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation, Celeste Saulo observes, “Sand and dust storms do not just mean dirty windows and hazy skies. They harm the health and quality of life of millions of people and cost many millions of dollars through disruption to air and ground transport, on agriculture and on solar energy production.”
When the wind is set fair, dust can be carried many thousands of miles beyond its source. In 2024, giant plumes of African dust reached across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and into South America, while the northward passage of Saharan dust to Europe is becoming ever more common. In the UK, it is not unusual – especially in summer – to find car windscreens and paintwork covered in a thin film of North African dust.
Such dusty conditions can bring orange-tinted skies and spectacular sunsets, and even so-called ‘Blood Rain’. This forms when precipitation falls through air thick with dust, forming muddy droplets that often have a reddish or orange tinge, and which leave every exposed surface covered in a sticky, rust-coloured layer.
In April 2025, it was Spain and Portugal’s turn to be deluged in blood rain, as a dust plume heading north from the Sahara, mixed with a storm moving westwards into Europe.
This dispersal of dust across great distances by winds and weather systems isn’t just a nuisance – it’s a health hazard.
Between 2018 and 2022, 3.8 billion people – getting on for half the planet’s population – were exposed to dust levels above the World Health Organisation’s safety threshold, a hike of more than 30 per cent compared to 2003-2007. In some places, populations were breathing air containing unsafe levels of dust on almost every day of the year.
A return to the Dust Bowl?
To understand what’s driving these storms to become increasingly destructive, we must first look at where they come from.
The raw material of most dust storms is loose surface soil. The 1930s Dust Bowl was largely a consequence of thoughtless farming methods, which involved digging up the tough prairie grasses that held the topsoil together, roots and all. When drought conditions destroyed the crops that replaced them, there was nothing to anchor the dried-out soils, which were spun up into the huge dust storms.
The Dust Bowl provided a salutary lesson in how not to farm, and led to better agricultural practices that mean a repeat is unlikely. Nonetheless, a combination of global heating, reducing water resources, and the spread of invasive plant varieties that increase the amount of bare soil, means that the US is rapidly becoming dustier, with the southwest of the country by far the worst affected – dust storms in the southwest increased almost two and a half times from the 1990s to the 2000s.
The US’s megadrought is now into its third decade, marking the most severe dry episode in more than a thousand years. Drought inevitably means more in the way of loose surface soil, so it is no surprise that they are becoming more frequent and more intense across the region.
They are then further galvanised by stronger winds and falling soil moisture levels, both related to changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation associated with large-scale variations in Pacific sea-surface temperatures.
Wind is just as important an ingredient as dry soils in the dust-storm recipe, essential as it is to lofting the dust high into the atmosphere. As Thomas Gill, an environmental scientist at the University of Texas, El Paso, points out, “You need wind as much as anything to get dust. The number of dust events will rely on the number of windstorms.”
A moderate breeze may be sufficient to promote a so-called dust ‘event’, which sees visibility reduced to somewhere between one and ten kilometres. Stronger winds will whip up more dust, slashing visibility to less than a kilometre, which marks the upper limit for dust storm conditions.
Less commonly, the violent downdraft associated with an intense thunderstorm can mobilise immense quantities of dust, driving a roiling, fast-moving wall of dust or sand known as a haboob.
What can we do?
As the planet continues to heat up, so it is getting far more arid.
The Sahara Desert expanded by almost a fifth in the 20th century and an astonishing three-quarters of the Earth's land has become permanently drier in the last 30 years.
Inevitably, a drier planet will also be a dustier one. But there are still actions that can be taken to damp down the dust – at least to some extent.
Increasing plant cover will obviously help by binding the soil together, though growing them is not easy in regions impacted by extreme drought conditions. Dirt roads, a big source of dust in the southwest US can be paved, and the surfaces of dried out lake beds – known as playas in this part of the country – can be carefully loosened and seeded with local flora.
Improved dust storm forecasting and warning systems can ensure that the elderly and vulnerable find shelter, while schools have time to send students home or keep them safe from the invading dust.
The spread of disease, like Valley Fever, will be a harder nut to crack, but strict masking guidelines should help to keep cases down.
The bottom line, however, is that bigger and bolder ‘deathstorms’ of dust are here to stay, and until we act to prevent the remorseless rise of global heating, they are only going to get worse.
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