Every year, massive dust clouds arise from the Sahara desert and travel across the Atlantic Ocean to the southern United States. They are known to be intact while travelling across the ocean and fade away by the time they hit the Caribbean.?
But, just like many other things, the yearly Saharan dust clouds are also unusual in the year 2020. They're?so opaque and thick that it can be clearly seen from the International Space Station.?
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This year, the dust is the densest it has been in a half a century, several meteorologists told Reuters.?
"Normally they¡¯re wispy and not very particulate. Just this past week, the international space station was able to look down upon the earth and see this gigantic dust cloud coming this way," Dr. Aaron Milstone, a pulmonologist at Williamson Medical Center, told Newschannel5.
The 3,500-mile-long (5,600 km) cloud, dubbed the "Godzilla dust cloud," travelled 5,000 miles (8,047 km) from North Africa before reaching the region stretching from Florida west into Texas, and north into North Carolina through Arkansas, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
?NOAA's GOES satellite captured this series of images on Friday, as the dust entered the deep tropical Atlantic from Africa.??
These dust plumes, called the Saharan Air Layer (or SAL) come about after severe wind storms strike the Sahara.? The dust cloud moved into the eastern Caribbean at the weekend and by Tuesday (June 23) had smothered Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and eastern Cuba, continuing its advance up and westward toward Central America and southern United States.?
"This is the most significant event in the past 50 years. Conditions are dangerous in many Caribbean islands," Pablo M¨¦ndez L¨¢zaro, from the University of Puerto Rico's School of Public Health, told the Associated Press.??
On social media, many posted a series of before and after photos taken in Caribbean islands like Antigua, St. Barts, Puerto Rico and Trindad and Tabago:
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"There's emerging evidence of potential interactions between air pollution and the risk of COVID, so at this stage we are concerned," said Gregory Wellenius, an professor of environmental health at Boston University's School of Public Health.??
Officials across the region warned locals to remain at home when possible and wear a face mask, especially if they already have a respiratory condition.?
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