California is currently experiencing one of the most severe droughts on record, but it is nothing compared to North America's worst drought of the last 1,000 years.
That distinction belongs to the drought of 1934, which was the driest and most widespread of the millennium, a new NASA study found. During that year, the American plains were transformed into the Dust Bowl, whose barren crop fields devastated farmers throughout most of the 1930s.
Scientists from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory used a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records in their analysis published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. They found that the drought in 1934 was 30 percent worse than the next severe drought in 1580. The 1934 drought covered 71.6 percent of western North America. The 2012 drought, which was the worst drought in more than half a century, had an average coverage of 59.7 percent.
