Is it possible to have another dust bowl

But in recent years some farmers have changed their practices to better conserve the soil , particularly after severe droughts in Tim Cowan, lead author and research fellow at the University of Southern Queensland, said the study concentrated on the impacts of temperature rises but that land management would have a big impact too.

However, improving land management could not remedy the damage done by the climate emergency. The researchers also found that there was a small but detectable impact from greenhouse gases on the dust bowl conditions of the s. The climate model used by the researchers, developed at Oxford, runs on the personal computers of volunteers from around the world. This article is more than 1 year old.

Abandoned farm buildings and machinery in the dust bowl caused by poor farming technique, as seen in May In the s, the Dust Bowl was caused by years of severe drought and featured dust storms up to 1, miles long. But the other driving force behind the plumes of dust that ravaged the landscape was the conversion of prairie to agricultural fields on a massive scale—between and the early s, farmers converted 5.

Hardy prairie grasses would have likely withstood the drought, but crops covering the newly converted tracts swiftly bit the proverbial dust, which loosened the grip their roots had on the soil.

Besides blotting out the sun, dust storms strip valuable nutrients from the soils, making the land less productive, and create a significant health hazard at a time when a respiratory illness is sickening people around the world, according to Science.

The new research, published earlier this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters , used data from NASA satellites and ground monitoring systems to detect a steady increase in the amount of dust being kicked into the atmosphere every year, reports Brooks Hays for United Press International.

The researchers found that levels of atmospheric dust swirling above the Great Plains region doubled between and The Dust Bowl is a distant memory, but the odds of such a drought happening again are increasing. Benjamin Cook of the NASA Goddard Institute explains that climate change is likely to lead to less rainfall regionally and higher temperatures nationwide. And this has an additional effect of further drying up the soils.

The impacts on agriculture could be dire, but fortunately, the next major drought will not cause a second dust bowl, as we are now better able to prevent soil erosion.