Dust in the wind

Is it dusty in Kansas, I always supposed it would be because of the words of this song title, a 1970's classic. But I don't know much about the geography ,of the  USA perhaps it is isn't dusty at all.  However I do know that Chad is probably the dustiest country on the planet, or at least the Bodélé depression to the North of us is,. It is in the  southern Sahara and is the lowest point in Chad and represents part of the old Mega lake Chad  ( 20 times bigger than today) that dried up thousands of years ago. It experiences  dust storms 100 days every year, and in season produces  an average 700 000 tonnes of dust a day.

We get dust storms  less often, but each year  before the rains the wind blows down from the north  we have dust storms the like of which you have never seen. You can see it coming as in the picture above, (Guinebor II 2009) a wall of dust hundreds of metre high rolling across the flat earth. A strange  silent vision of the calm before the storm and then the wind arrives blows, gusting snapping hard grown trees, twisting street lights, ripping of roofs making walls fall . We get people injured by flying sheet metal etc and there are sometimes deaths.  After  the strong winds pass  the dust rests in the air, the sky is an eerie orange and a fine silt gets into the houses and coats every surface. 

Occasionally you get Sahara dust in the UK with spectacular sunsets and a faint dusting on your car, other places get it harder, it made BBC news when a dust storm disrupted the Dubai air show it  and another  unusual storm  killed 4 people in Tehran earlier this month. Here  it doesn't  make the news its part of life.

All this dust can't be good for health, last year the BMJ informed me that arrival of Saharan dust has been linked to hospital admissions  in Italy due to respiratory disease, heart attacks and strokes, the first makes a lot of sense  to me, and you do see people riding motorbikes with surgical masks in Ndjamena, the other two  I don't fully understand the mechanism  but it is clear dust can't be good  for you. Is it also linked to global warming and heat trapping ?  Really something needs to be done!

 

 

NASA: Bodélé depression dust storm from space

Ndjamena is  just below Lake Chad

 

                            

 

But life is never that simple, the dust from the Bodélé depression is swept up into the atmosphere and it travels extraordinary distances. Each year 50 million tonnes of mineral rich dried diatoms  from the old lake bed are deposited on the Amazon  acting  as  fertiliser . This meets half of the Amazons annual requirement. The world's biggest rain forest is supported by the world's biggest dust bowl. Dust from the depression also fertilises the Atlantic ocean causing blooms of phytoplankton at the bottom of the food chain. An amazing interdependence and  something that at first seems to only  be a problem is actually  a vital part of the world ecosystem.

Back to the hauntingly sad song,

I closed my eyes,

Only for a moment ,and the moments gone,

All my dreams, pass before my eyes a curiosity,

Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

Same old song

 

Just a drop of water in an endless sea,

 

All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

 

Don't hang on,

Nothing lasts forever but  the earth and sky

It slips away,

All your money won't another minute buy

Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind

 Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind

 ( lyrics  from  Dust in the wind, Kansas)

 

Life can be hard, at times we could all give up in despair.  'It's all meaningless', says the writer of Ecclesiastes,  'a chasing after the wind' . In human terms we are all insignificant on the world stage of 7 billion people , but perhaps with God's help our grain of dust can be of  some significance and benefit to someone , somewhere on this planet.

                                                                                 

                                               A nearly perfect dust print of a paper cut

                                                    Valentines card in Chadian dust

Come and hear about our grains of dust making a difference at Guinebor II as we return to the UK this summer on the following dates 

              Wakefield Baptist, (6 July 10:30 and 6:30)      

                St Leonards East Sussex(13 July 10:30)

          Hull, Cottingham Road (20 July 10:30)

          Louth, Eastgate Union (20 July pm)

          Macclesfield, All Saints  C of E  (27 July 9:30)

          Forest Gate, Woodgrange London(10 August 11:00)

Possibly Penzance Chapel Street Methodist(17 August) TBC 

              and Kettering Fuller  (24 August)  (TBC)