Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 797 of Weather Break.

When you dust your furniture, have you ever wondered where all that dust came from? Well, indoors and in our part of the world, most of what you find is lint and dirt and pet dander, but a certain amount of what’s there came from far away locations. The single largest source of dust for the atmosphere is actually the Sahara Desert. While the Sahara is overall a pretty dusty place, there are a couple of individual parts of the desert that are particularly dusty, and the most impressive of these is the so-called Bodele Depression in Chad. The Bodele Depression is commonly referred to as the dustiest place on Earth, and with good reason. A combination of particularly loose, silty soils and unusually strong winds means that a surprisingly large chunk of all of the dust in the atmosphere comes from this one little part of North Africa. Why is the Bodele Depression so dusty and windy? Tune in to today’s episode of Weather Break to find out!

Links

For more information about the Bodele Depression, visit:

• this article
• NASA
• Oxford
• National Academy of Science
• Wikipedia