Puzzle No. 58: Chain

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 to 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.

Read the full story · See the world in 1934 CE

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

Before The Dust Bowl

After The Dust Bowl