In the early 20thcentury, farmers across the Great Plains harnessed new technology to cash in on a huge demand for wheat.
But over-farming led to the removal of prairie grasses which had kept the topsoil in place.
For years, the region was bombarded by monster dust storms called "black blizzards" that sometimes buried entire houses in grit.
For almost 10 years, the Great Plains became a desert wasteland.
During the 1930s, after an intensive period of over-farming, dust storms regularly wreaked havoc, blanketing towns and farms in grit, destroying crops and making people sick.
The drought and storms led to one of the largest mass migrations in a short period of time in US history.
When it was over, better farming practices were instituted to ensure it never happened again. But even so, in 2020, new research found that the heat waves which caused the dust bowl were more than twice as likely to occur as in the 1930s.
Here's what it was like and why it could happen again.
It all began with wheat. In the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of farmers moved to the Great Plains, a stretch of arid land once covered in native grasses that stretched across much of middle America from Texas to Montana.
The farmers were enticed by new federal laws to buy land off developers who had divided massive ranches up for farming.
In the following years, they planted millions of acres of wheat and corn.
Demand for crops, wheat in particular, was high in the 1920s due to World War I. Farmers harnessed new technology like tractors to get the most from their land. At the same time, the weather provided the region with plenty of rain.
Until then, prairie grasses had kept topsoil in place, but with all of the intensive farming and over-ploughing, the soil became less stable.
Everything came to a head in the early 1930s when the Great Depression hit alongside a severe drought. Suddenly the demand for wheat had disappeared and the overworked land was ruined.
In 1932, fourteen dust storms were reported. By 1933 it was up to 38. The storms rolled through towns "like bowling balls," according to a report by the New York Times.
But the dust was toxic. Locals who breathed it in dealt with asthma, influenza, bronchitis and terrible coughs. Hundreds of people ended up dying from the "brown plague," which was basically dust-induced pneumonia.
It wasn't just the Great Plains that were struggling. In 1934, more than 75% of the US was hit by a drought. The drought hurt 27 states. Here's Chicago blanketed under a dust cloud several miles long in May of that year.
But the Great Plains experienced the worst of it. In 1934 and 1936, the region suffered two of the most intense heatwaves in US history.
In Iowa the temperature hit 118 degrees in 1934, while Oklahoma, Kansas, South Dakota, and North Dakota all hit 120 degrees in 1936.
Climate scientists have found heat and droughts go hand in hand.
University of Brussels climate scientist Wim Thiery told Yale Environment 360, "Dry soils have this exacerbating effect. There is this positive feedback where dry soils lead to more warmth."
If soil is damp then the moisture evaporates under hot sunlight, but when there's no moisture the land heats up easier, meaning more droughts, which in turn means more heatwaves.
Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt the government had been working to help the region during these years.
The government's initiatives included federal aid, limiting banks' ability to evict farmers, relief funds, new employment opportunities, buying cattle off farmers.
It also took over millions of acres of land and converted it into carefully monitored grazing districts.
But the drought and the storms continued. In 1935, the "Black Sunday" dust storm hit the High Plains. It rolled across the country to cities on the East Coast and the Atlantic Ocean. It is considered the worst storm of the period.
Even locals who had lived through countless dust storms thought it was the end of the world.
One AP reporter who was trapped in a car overnight after failing to outrun it coined the term "dust bowl." He wrote, "Three little words — achingly familiar on a western farmer's tongue — rule life today in the dust bowl of the continent … 'if it rains.'"
Black Sunday triggered a national response. Within a fortnight, Congress had called soil erosion "a national menace." It established a new service focused on soil practices, including advocating for rotating crops, terracing, and contour plowing.
In 1937, the government also launched Shelterbelt Project, a planting project which went for 12 years and cost about $75 million. The aim was to plant up 100 miles of plains between Texas and Canada.
And it seemed like the Dust Bowl was a period of US history that no one would ever forget—with iconic photos of the struggle, including this one by Dorothea Lange of Florence Owens Thompson—but that would never be repeated.
Even so, in 2020, new research found—despite all of the improved farming practices—that the heat waves which caused the dust bowl were more than twice as likely to occur as in the 1930s, due to global warming.
The reason it hadn't already happened was because irrigation had kept the land damper and cooler than in the 1930s.
Farmers on the Great Plains now rely on water from underground aquifers including the Ogallala Aquifer—one of the world's biggest aquifers—for their irrigation. Up to 46% of irrigated farmland in the area use it.
This aquiver is being overdrawn and some experts have said 70% of it might be used up with the next 50 years.
When the groundwater is depleted a similar period could begin.
US Geological Survey hydrologist Virginia McGuire, who monitors the Ogallala Aquifer, told Yale Environment 360 that water levels in some areas were less than half the size they were 100 years ago.
She said, "If that trend doesn't change, at some point there's going to have to be a reckoning."
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