Each year on average, a dizzying 182 million tons of dust departs from the western Sahara, enough to fill 4,550,000 semi trucks. These clouds of dust make up one of the greatest annual migrations on the planet—not animal, but mineral. It begins in the Sahara, where wind storms levitate enormous plumes of desert dust thousands of feet above the surface of the Earth. There, in camel-colored wisps thousands of miles long, the dust hitchhikes on trade winds traveling west, across the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Saharan dust clouds make this transcontinental trek all the time, and on the way the dust falls and settles in the ocean, in rainforests, and, occasionally, on the windshields of...
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