The Dust Bowl

Date

1930–1940 (peak 1934–1936)

Category

Environment & climate

Region

Great Plains, United States (Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico)

Era

Modern

Significance

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms and ecological catastrophe that devastated the agriculture and ecology of the American and Canadian Great Plains during the 1930s.

It resulted from a collision of prolonged severe drought with decades of unsustainable farming practices, as settlers had stripped away the deep-rooted native prairie grasses through extensive mechanised ploughing, leaving the topsoil exposed to wind erosion. The drought struck in waves, with major peaks in 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, and by 1934 roughly 35 million acres of cultivated land had been rendered useless while another 125 million acres were rapidly losing their soil. Towering 'black blizzards' carried millions of tons of dust across the continent, most infamously on Black Sunday, 14 April 1935, when a wall of dust darkened the skies of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas; a storm in May 1934 reached as far as New York City and Washington, D.C. The disaster drove an estimated mass migration of plains families, the so-called 'Okies,' westward toward California, and it spurred federal action including the creation of the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 and the planting of the Great Plains Shelterbelt. The Dust Bowl is remembered as one of the worst human-caused environmental disasters in American history and a defining hardship of the Great Depression.

Empires active in 1930–1940 (peak 1934–1936)

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related environment & climate events

• 1931 Central China Floods
  June–August 1931
• Eruption of Mount Tambora and the Year Without a Summer
  10 April 1815 (climactic eruption); global cooling through 1816
• Yellowstone, the world's first national park
  1 March 1872
• Bhopal Gas Disaster
  December 2-3, 1984
• The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
  1986
• Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer
  16 September 1987

Further reading

A New Green History of the World

The wider story

A New Green History of the World

Clive Ponting

The classic accessible account of how environment and climate have shaped human history.

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