RSS
Home
Black blizzards: must-see environmental TV
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Droughts come, and droughts go, around the world. NASA satellites track weather patterns and scientists analyze them, but that help wasn't available during the Dust Bowl days on the U.S. Plains in the 1930's. Shown above: a black blizzard, or black roller, bearing down on Boise City, OK.
The History Channel is again airing its Black Blizzard special over the next few days. It's must-see TV for not only historical reasons, but also current environmental concerns.
Watch as scientists and special effects experts recreate the black blizzards in amazing detail and reveal that this was a man-made disaster. Discover how these phenomena form, what they're made of, and how they affect people's health and the environment. Learn how a black blizzard emerged so ferociously that it seemed like a moving mountain range creating enough static electricity to power New York City.
Although the Plains suffered a fierce drought, the Dust Bowl was actually a man-created crisis. The U.S. government, seeking to kill the buffalo, capture or kill Native Americans, and put farmers on large sections of land, offered free farm lands and transportation. Immigrants whose families had never owned land found themselves the proud owners of hundreds of acres.
The primary crop was wheat, touted by the U.S. Ironically, when the new wheat farmers moved in, the Plains were in a wet cycle. Wheat practically jumped out of the ground--and wheat prices skyrocketed.
For the first time, the U.S. was a major wheat exporter. The Plains, once the greatest natural grassland in the world, was broken by the plow, turned over and over. The native grasslands, which had evolved over thousands of years, anchored the Earth and were able to ride out the rain/drought cycles.
With that grass plowed up and thrown away, the prairie soil had nothing to hold it to the land. As drought settled in, farmers were told to plow the land over, again and again. Experts actually believed the breaking up the land would bring rain.
By the time more than a foot of soil had been gouged, turned, and tossed, conditions were set when a major drought settled in. NASA analyzed the cause of that drought:
Siegfried Schubert of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues used a computer model developed with modern-era satellite data to look at the climate over the past 100 years.
..."The 1930s drought was the major climatic event in the nation's history," Schubert said. "Just beginning to understand what occurred is really critical to understanding future droughts and the links to global climate change issues we're experiencing today."
By discovering the causes behind U.S. droughts, especially severe episodes like the Plains' dry spell, scientists may recognize and possibly foresee future patterns that could create similar conditions. For example, La Niñas are marked by cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface water temperatures, which impact weather globally, and also create dry conditions over the Great Plains.
The researchers used NASA's Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP) atmospheric general circulation model and agency computational facilities to conduct the research. The NSIPP model was developed using NASA satellite observations, including; Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System radiation measurements; and the Global Precipitation Climatology Project precipitation data.
The black blizzards killed cattle standing in the field. The finely-hewn grains of sand swept into houses that were defenseless. Many died because they could not avoid inhaling dust, until their lungs filled up.
After natural predators were killed off, rabbits multiplied, scavenging anything that was left to eat. Locusts, grasshoppers, and hordes of poisonous spiders swept across the land, often moving into houses. Death by spider bite, especially of the elder, became all too common. Babies and young children, lungs damaged, died in after-effects from the black blizzards.
Another danger: the high levels of static electricity generated by the storms. Those effects were felt in far Eastern cities like Chicago, Boston and New York as the remnants the horrific Black Sunday storm covered major metropolitan areas in a huge blow-in during "the dirty 30's." In today's world, the level of static electricity most likely would knock out modern computer, cellphone and satellite communications.
Foreclosures became common, even though neighbors tried to band together to rescue each other with "penny auctions." More than 200,000 farms were seized--and Washington, which had created the entire mess with its wheat farming methods and encouragement, refused to help.
Moving throughout the devastated areas, men who described themselves as "rainmakers," hired themselves out to bring rain. Although many were out-and-out charlatans, a few, including Tex Thornton, were ahead of their times. Setting off fireworks or gun blasts became part of the building blocks of weather modification. Today, with drought again threatening some sections of the Plains, farmers and experts are trying to bring rain by seeding the clouds with iodine.
But the heartbreak, starvation, suffering and loss of the 1930's couldn't be forestalled even when a wandering rainmaker got lucky and brought a few trickles or rain. The dust ruled all. Some families literally gritted it out. Others didn't make it, and some went on to become the "Okies" portrayed in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
The Dust Bowl and its black blizzards were a personal, social, financial, and environmental disaster of mythic proportions. Sadly enough, it was created by government's failure to understand and care for the land, and its direct action in destroying the natural elements of the Plains.
Today, NASA uses sophisticated methods to monitor vegetation, photographed from space, weather patterns, and the chance for upcoming famine. In late 2008, several studies focused on the droughts in Ethiopia.
But scientific analysis doesn't make public policy. The 2lst century question is: have we learned enough to avoid a similiar disaster?
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
