Transportation By The Wind
In the desert the finer waste is continually swept to and fro by the ever-shifting wind. Even in quiet weather the air heated by contact with the hot sands rises in whirls, and the dust is lifted in stately columns, sometimes as much as one thousand feet in height, which march slowly across the plain. In storms the sand is driven along the ground in a continuous sheet, while the air is tilled with dust. Explorers tell of sand storms in the deserts of central Asia and Africa, in which the air grows murky and suffocating. Even at midday it may become dark as night, and nothing can be heard except the roar of the blast and the whir of myriads of grains of sand as they fly past the ear.
Sand storms are by no means uncommon in the arid regions of the western United States. In a recent year, six were reported from Yuma, Arizona. Trains on transcontinental railways are occasionally blockaded by drifting sand, and the dust sifts into closed passenger coaches, covering the seats and floors. After such a storm thirteen car loads of sand were removed from the platform of a station on a western railway.
Dust falls. Dust launched by upward-whirling winds on the swift currents of the upper air is often blown for hundreds of miles beyond the arid region from which it was taken. Dust falls from western storms are not unknown even as far east as the Great Lakes. In 1896 a “black snow” fell in Chicago, and in another dust storm in the same decade the amount of dust carried in the air over Rock Island, Ill., was estimated at more than one thousand tons to the cubic mile.
Fig. 120. A Tract of Rocky Desert, Arabia
By what process have these rocks been broken up?
Why is finer waste here absent?
In March, 1901, a cyclonic storm carried vast quantities of dust from the Sahara northward across the Mediterranean to fall over southern and central Europe. On March 8th dust storms raged in southern Algeria; two days later the dust fell in Italy; and on the 11th it had reached central Germany and Denmark. It is estimated that in these few days one million eight hundred thousand tons of waste were carried from northern Africa and deposited on European soil.
We may see from these examples the importance of the wind as an agent of transportation, and how vast in the aggregate are the loads which it carries. There are striking differences between air and water as carriers of waste. Rivers flow in fixed and narrow channels to definite goals. The channelless streams of the air sweep across broad areas, and, shifting about continually, carry their loads back and forth, now in one direction and now in another.
Wind Deposits