Arable land can have a negative impact on a...(f the most fertile soils in the world bu...)

Date:5/6/2008

f the most fertile soils in the world, but it is also very fine and therefore particularly sensitive to erosion. On this day, 23 March 2007, gusts of wind with speeds of up to 90 kilometres per hour were whipping up huge quantities of dust in the steppe. A dust cloud formed that was so big that it was later clearly visible on the weather satellite infrared pictures. At this point, no one living 1500 kilometres to the west suspected what was in store for people in Germany and their eastern neighbours. Thanks to an area of high pressure over Scandinavia and an area of low pressure moving from the Black Sea to Italy, the air mass quickly drifted to Central Europe. Just one day later the air with its cargo of fine dust from the Ukrainian fields had arrived in Germany.

Tracking down a mystery

In Germany, people in the Erz Mountains were not a little surprised when the sky took on a slightly yellow sheen. The controllers from the state air monitoring network also realised very quickly that something unusual had happened. Their filters were a much browner colour than usual, which meant that there must have been a lot more dust in the air. In the offices of the particulate experts at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research the phones were ringing. Dr Wolfram Birmili has for years been investigating the long-distance transport of particulates in the troposphere, i.e. the lower few kilometres of the atmosphere. He and his colleagues quickly ruled out the classic air pollutants, such as coal-fired power stations and forest fires, because their measuring instruments showed unusually high levels of coarse-grained particles (larger than 0.001 mm) in the dust plume. The relatively low carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide concentrations also seemed to rule out industrial sources and biomass combustion. Dust from the Sahara Desert had caused a stir in Germany several times in the past. But the Sahara was not a possibility either, because the weather co
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Contact: Tilo Arnhold presse@ufz.de 49-341-235-1635 Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres Source:Eurekalert

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