Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research

DUST

Monday 22 February 2021
Saharan dust in Europe
Every year, about 180 Million Ton (180,000,000,000kg) is blown with the Trade winds towards the Atlantic Ocean and less than a quarter of that material (~40MTon) reaches the Caribbean. This dust takes about one week to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a…
Tuesday 12 January 2021
Dust2021
From 12 January to 6 February 2021 we have been chasing Saharan dust once more. We have serviced both the dust-collecting buoys "Carmen" and "Laura" as well as sediment-trap mooring M1. These three moorings had been monitoring and sampling Saharan…
Wednesday 24 June 2020
Godzilla
An enormous dust storm is making its way across the Atlantic towards the Americas. The dust outbreak, named ‘Godzilla’ because of its size, is a typical summer phenomenon that originates in northwest Africa.
Tuesday 07 April 2020
New dusty paper out: Saharan dust versus Amazon River water
In their new paper that appeared today in the open-access version of Limnology & Oceanography, entitled “Multiple drivers of production and particle export in the western tropical North Atlantic”, Laura Korte and colleagues present a comprehensive…
Friday 13 March 2020
New dusty paper out: Transatlantic Saharan dust fluxes
In their new paper that appeared today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Michèlle van der Does and colleagues present the first continuous two-year record of Transatlantic Saharan-dust fluxes, which they compare to modelled dust fluxes…
Wednesday 26 February 2020
Calima at the Canary Islands
Every now and then, the Canary Islands experience severe dust outbreaks from the Sahara Desert. The local population call the wind that carries the Saharan dust "Calima" , which is in fact the local name for the dry and hot winds that are also known…
Tuesday 05 November 2019
Expedition 64PE464: DUST2019
From 11 to 23 November 2019 we have been chasing Saharan dust once more. On 11 November RV Pelagia has left the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) to sail south for a two-week expedition to service both the dust-collecting buoys "Carmen" and…
Monday 01 July 2019
DUST | Loooooong tropical-cyclone records
In their new paper that appeared today in the open-access journal Geophysical Research Letters, Jan-Berend Stuut and colleagues present one of the longest existing continuous records (5.3 Million years) of climate history of the northwestern part of…
Tuesday 23 April 2019
DUST | Spring dust is in the air!
Not only spring is in the air; a lot of Saharan dust is presently also blowing towards northern Europe. The distance between the sources in northern Africa and The Netherlands is so large that the material is predominantly very fine grained: clay and…
Thursday 13 December 2018
DUST | Giant dust particles in new Science paper
In their new paper that appeared today in the open-access version of Science, Michèlle van der Does and colleagues show how so-called "giant dust particles" defy gravity and are blown through the atmosphere across distances of several thousands of…