What was dust bowl 1930

Most areas of the country were returned to receiving near-normal rainfalls. The outbreak of World War II also helped to improve the economic situation. Another severe drought spread across the U. In the s, drought covered virtually the entire Plains for almost a decade Warrick, Many crops were damaged by deficient rainfall, high temperatures, and high winds, as well as insect infestations and dust storms that accompanied these conditions.

Although records focus on other problems, the lack of precipitation would also have affected wildlife and plant life, and would have created water shortages for domestic needs. A dust storm approaching Rolla, Kansas, May 6, Image: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives. Although the s drought is often referred to as if it were one episode, there were at least 4 distinct drought events: —31, , , and —40 Riebsame et al.

These events occurred in such rapid succession that affected regions were not able to recover adequately before another drought began. Effects of the Plains drought sent economic and social ripples throughout the country. For example, millions of people migrated from the drought areas, often heading west, in search of work. These newcomers were often in direct competition for jobs with longer-established residents, which created conflict between the groups.

In addition, because of poverty and high unemployment, migrants added to local relief efforts, sometimes overburdening relief and health agencies. Many circumstances exacerbated the effects of the drought, among them the Great Depression and economic overexpansion before the drought, poor land management practices, and the areal extent and duration of the drought.

Warrick et al. The peculiar combination of these circumstances and the severity and areal coverage of the event played a part in making the s drought the widely accepted drought of record for the United States. To cope with and recover from the drought, people relied on ingenuity and resilience, as well as relief programs from state and federal governments. Despite all efforts, many people were not able to make a living in drought-stricken regions and were forced to migrate to other areas in search of a new livelihood.

It is not possible to count all the costs associated with the s drought, but one estimate by Warrick et al. Fortunately, the lessons learned from this drought were used to reduce the vulnerability of the regions to future droughts. In the early s, farmers saw several opportunities for increasing their production.

New technology and crop varieties were reducing the time and costs-per-acre of farming, which provided a great incentive for agricultural expansion. This expansion was also necessary to pay for expensive, newly developed equipment such as listers and plows that was often purchased on credit, and to offset low crop prices after World War I.

When the national economy went into decline in the late s because of the Great Depression, agriculture was even more adversely affected.

In addition, a record wheat crop in sent crop prices even lower. These lower prices meant that farmers needed to cultivate more acreage, including poorer farmlands, or change crop varieties to produce enough grain to meet their required equipment and farm payments.

When drought began in the early s, it worsened these poor economic conditions. The depression and drought hit farmers on the Great Plains the hardest. Many of these farmers were forced to seek government assistance. However, even with government help, many farmers could not maintain their operations and were forced to leave their land. Some voluntarily deeded their farms to creditors, others faced foreclosure by banks, and still others had to leave temporarily to search for work to provide for their families.

In fact, at the peak of farm transfers in —34, nearly 1 in 10 farms changed possession, with half of those being involuntary from a combination of the depression and drought.

Farm family, Sargent, Nebraska, There are two good reasons to ask this question. First we know from studies elsewhere in the world e. See our page "Was the Dust Bowl Predictable? We have addressed this using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies atmosphere GCM which contains a dust module that can lift up dust from the surface, transport it in the atmosphere and allow it to interact with solar and longwave radiation transfer in the atmosphere.

First we ran a small ensemble of simulations with the atmosphere model forced by s sea surface temperatures SSTs to act as our base of comparison for the simulated s. Next we created a small ensemble of simulations with the model forced by s SSTs. This created a drought that, as is typical for models forced by s SSTs, was centered too far into the Southwest relative to the observed drought. Then we introduced an estimate of the increased dust source from crop failure in the s.

This was guided by maps of wind erosion prepared in the s by the newly created Soil Conservation Service. Regions of severe wind erosion were put into the model as potential dust sources although the model's dust module determines the actual lifting up, transport and deposition of the dust.

The modeled dust emissions are around half the size of the scanty estimates from s observations so the modeled climate impact may still be on the conservative side. View Movie.

Figure 1 shows a 'box and whiskers' plot of the precipitation anomalies over the Great Plains for the modeled period minus the s for both observations and the two model simulations. Here we have used the anomalies for each year in the observations and each year in the model run and for each of the 5 ensemble members.

Artist Alexander Hogue painted Dust Bowl landscapes. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl. Roosevelt Institute. About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois. Dust Bowl Migration.

University of California at Davis. The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society. What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment. The Dust Bowl. Library of Congress.

Dust Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Ken Burns; PBS. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean. Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act in to encourage settlement in areas where crop irrigation was infeasible, even while acknowledging the challenges the dry western landscape entailed.

Shortly after that, World War I created new demand for American wheat in Europe, where exports from Russia had been cut off. Technology was pivotal. The Federal Farm Loan Act of enabled easy credit for farm machinery, and the introduction of gasoline-powered tractors rounded out the capitalist industrialization of wheat agriculture. Land — even if only marginally suited for agriculture — was idle capital awaiting a productive purpose.

When overproduction and the resumption of Russian wheat exports created a surplus that dramatically lowered prices, farmers responded by breaking yet more sod to make up for their loss of income. The wheat entrepreneur of that era was held up as a social ideal, an independent master of his economic destiny who efficiently extracted wealth from the soil.

They returned the following summer to harvest their crop and cash out. Farm prices had already collapsed in the Great Depression when an unyielding drought hit in By this narrative, the ecological disaster had economic roots.