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Phoenix666 writes:

Dust in the wind is more important than you think:

In the United States, the 2017 National Climate Assessment found that warmer temperatures are reducing soil moisture in parts of the West, and also predicts more drought in the coming years. These factors kill vegetation that keeps soil in place and have already led to more dust storms. And winds that blow in from the Pacific Ocean are increasing as ocean temperatures heat up. That, in turn, draws in drier north winds that suck moisture out of the soil in the southwestern U.S. The frequency of dust storms there has more than doubled since the 1990s—from 20 per year to 48 in the 2000s—and will likely continue to increase, according to one study.

On the other side of the world, weather patterns in some regions have shifted in a different way. Rainfall in the Sahara has increased because of warmer ocean temperatures, which has meant less dust blowing westward across the Atlantic Ocean. Dust storms have also declined in the deserts of China and South America and are projected to be lower in the Great Plains of the U.S.—all because of an increase in precipitation that stimulates plant growth, which caps the soil.

Peripatetic dust is an ancient and vital geological phenomenon because dust carries nutrients that regulate the distribution of life across the planet. A recent study found that dust from the Gobi Desert—one of the world's two major sources of dust, along with the Sahara—has long ridden the jet stream and settled in the Sierras in California, where it provides an essential source of life-giving phosphorous for the giant sequoias and other trees in that phosphorous-limited ecosystem. The study found that dust provides even more phosphorous than the other major source—the weathering of bedrock in the mountains.

"Dust is a connector of ecosystems around the world," said Emma Aronson, a plant pathologist and microbiologist at the University of California at Riverside and a co-author of the study.

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