dust bowl

     

The Dust Bowl, or the irty thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940), caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques to prevent erosion. It was a mostly man-made disaster caused when virgin top soil of the Great Plains was exposed to deep plowing, killing the natural grasses - the grasses normally kept the soil in place and moisture trapped, even during periods of drought and high winds. However, during the drought of the 1930s, with the grasses destroyed, the soil dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastwards and southwards in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky, reaching all the way to East Coast cities like New York and Washington D.C., with much of the soil deposited in the Atlantic Ocean. The Dust Bowl consisted of 100 million acres, centered on the panhandles of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

Trivia about dust bowl

  • In April 1935 in Oklahoma, when blowing soil darkened the sky, a reporter coined this term for the region
  • It wasn't a college football game, it was the Great Plains area racked by drought in the 1930s
  • This bowl game was played in a drought-ridden section of the Great Plains in the 1930s
  • Nickname given in the 1930s to the area seen here in a famous Arthur Rothstein photo
  • During the 1930s this drought-ridden area of the Great Plains included parts of Kansas, Oklahoma & Texas
  • "The Grapes of Wrath" showed the plight of Oklahoma migrants from this 1930s Midwest region
  • A reporter is credited with creating this term for the wind-eroded area of the Great Plains in the 1930s
  • Nickname of the area abandoned by the Okies & Arkies in the 1930s to go to California
  • NASA has said cooler Pacific temperatures & warmer Atlantic temperatures helped cause this from 1931 to 1939