The 1934 Dust Bowl was the worst drought seen in 1,000 years, according to NASA researchers. That event was triggered by a combination of human actions and unusual atmospheric conditions, compounding suffering in a land racked by the Great Depression.
Land use practices that did not protect the soil combined with a high-pressure system over the Western United States to create extremely dry conditions.
"In combination, then, these two different phenomena managed to bring almost the entire nation into a drought at that time. The fact that it was the worst of the millennium was probably in part because of the human role," Richard Seager from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University said.
During the 1930s, farms around the central regions of the United States failed, and starvation was common in the heartlands of the nation. The drought 80 years ago was 30 percent worse than the second-worst such event, which took place in 1580. Researchers now believe the Great Dust Bowl was the worst drought to take place in North America during the last 10 centuries.
Dust from Texas blew in a yellowish haze that covered large swaths of land in New Mexico, Colorado, the Oklahoma panhandle and Kansas. People caught in the storms were suddenly unable to breathe, walk or eat without great difficulty. Farmers watched winds blow their crops away from fields, while children walked to school wearing dust masks.
The Dust Bowl began with a drought in 1931, turning overworked land into "black blizzards" that traveled across much of the West. Particles in the air blocked sunlight, reducing evaporation, which limited cloud formation and further reduced precipitation levels.
The Farm Credit Act of 1933 was established by the federal government to assist farmers who faced foreclosure from the dust storms. The Shelterbelt Project championed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was launched in 1937, aimed at planting trees from Texas to Canada in order to prevent further soil erosion.
Rains did not return to normal until 1939, just as World War II was starting in Europe.
"The Grapes of Wrath," one of the great novels of John Steinbeck, follows the Joads, a family reeling from the Depression, only to be caught in the Great Dust Bowl. A young folk singer named Woody Guthrie found himself unable to support his family during the economic downturn. He traveled along Route 66 during the dust storms in an effort to make money, developing native folk music into a new art form along the way.
The study on the Great Dust Bowl was detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
