Every year, millions of tons of Saharan dust flies 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to the Amazon basin, where it settles in and helps plants grow.
Since 2007, NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) has been monitoring the particles as they travel from Africa to South America, and the plumes can be spotted from space. On average, 182 million tons of dust leaves Africa annually, and of that amount about 27 million tons make it to the Amazon. Once there, it replenishes phosphorous lost from surface runoff and flooding. "Using satellites to get a clear picture of dust is important for understand and eventually using computers to model where that dust will go now and in future climate scenarios," NASA research scientist Hongbin Yu said. —Catherine Garcia
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
US won its war on 'murder hornets,' officials saySpeed Read The announcement comes five years after the hornets were first spotted in the US
-
Dark energy data suggest Einstein was rightSpeed Read Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity has been proven correct, according to data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
-
New DNA tests of Pompeii dead upend popular storiesSpeed Read An analysis of skeletal remains reveals that some Mount Vesuvius victims have been wrongly identified
-
NASA's Europa Clipper blasts off, seeking an oceanSpeed Read The ship is headed toward Jupiter on a yearslong journey
-
Detailed map of fly's brain holds clues to human mindSpeed Read This remarkable fruit fly brain analysis will aid in future human brain research
-
Blind people will listen to next week's total eclipseSpeed Read While they can't see the event, they can hear it with a device that translates the sky's brightness into music
-
Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeepingSpeed Read Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
-
An amphibian that produces milk?speed read Caecilians, worm-like amphibians that live underground, produce a milk-like substance for their hatchlings
