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Oct 27, 2009 · The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a drought in the 1930s.
Sep 9, 2024 · The term Dust Bowl was suggested by conditions that struck the region in the early 1930s. The area’s grasslands had supported mostly stock raising until World War I, when millions of acres were put under the plow in order to grow wheat.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families, who were unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, to abandon their farms, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $550 million in 2023).
Sep 14, 2023 · The Dust Bowl was arguably one of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th century. It degraded soil productivity, reduced air quality, and ravaged the local flora and fauna. The dust storms also caused dust pneumonia among residents who didn’t migrate.
- Maria Trimarchi
- One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean. While “black blizzards” constantly menaced Plains states in the 1930s, a massive dust storm 2 miles high traveled 2,000 miles before hitting the East Coast on May 11, 1934.
- The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster. Beginning with World War I, American wheat harvests flowed like gold as demand boomed. Lured by record wheat prices and promises by land developers that “rain follows the plow,” farmers powered by new gasoline tractors over-plowed and over-grazed the southern Plains.
- The ecosystem disruption unleashed plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers. If the dust storms that turned daylight to darkness weren’t apocalyptic enough, seemingly biblical plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers descended on the Plains and destroyed whatever meager crops could grow.
- Proposed solutions were truly out-of-the-box. There were few things desperate Dust Bowl residents didn’t try to make it rain. Some followed the old folklore of killing snakes and hanging them belly-up on fences.
Nineteen states in the heartland of the United States became a vast dust bowl. With no chance of making a living, farm families abandoned their homes and land, fleeing westward to become migrant laborers.
Jan 22, 2020 · The Dust Bowl was the name given to an area of the Great Plains (southwestern Kansas, Oklahoma panhandle, Texas panhandle, northeastern New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado) that was devastated by nearly a decade of drought and soil erosion during the 1930s.
