Articles - Features

On Wednesday morning residents of eastern Australia woke to a fiery dawn. A freak dust storm, the country's worst in 70 years,  blotted out the sun, turning the sky bright orange and prompting newspaper headlines drawing inspiration from the Book of Revelation.

The dust blew in from the parched interior in a pall so dense that  seen from space it obscures the land completely in places. According to ABC news, much of the dust comes from agricultural lands that have not been planted because of a drought that has plagued the country for many years.

The concentration of particles in the air reached 15,000 micrograms per cubic meter in New South Wales during the storm. The normal concentration is 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter.


PICTURE: Image captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The image has also been superimposed on Google Earth and is available at http://earthobservatory.nasa