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Dust Bowl: Great Plains
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The Great Plow-up was the start of the Dust Bowl, which soon meant an end to farming and plant life. Investment minded farmers chased opportunity and high profits. This fueled the expansion of farmland and agricultural technology to the Plains. As Worster explains, “Essentially the great plow-up was the work of a generation of aggressive entrepreneurs, embued with the values and world view of American agricultural capitalism.” (214). These farmers took an investment in farming and financed the machines that would plow-up and replace nature with fields of agricultural profit. Exposing a bare geographically flat region, to wind erosion caused the area to be engulfed in dust storms.
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Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the skys.
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This article looks at research into the Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the plains of the United States. An 8 year drought transformed the central U.S. during a lengthy La Niña when sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific were cooler than normal. A computer model made by Travis A. O'Brien at the University of California, Santa Cruz, estimates the effect of airborne dust on the Midwestern climate at the time. Reading Level (Lexile): 1390;
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The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade. Its primary area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were not so badly effected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In fact the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains was ... profound.
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One of the worst climatic events in the history of the United States was the "Dust Bowl" drought which devastated the United States central states region known as the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl all but dried up an already depressed American economy in the 1930's creating millions of dollars in damages. With modern technology, NASA now believes the Jet Stream was partly responsible for this drought.
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UNC-Chapel Hill alumna Barbara Wright transports the reader to the Dust Bowl of eastern Colorado in the mid-1930s in her novel Plain Language (Simon & Schuster, 340 pages, $13). Virginia Mendenhall, a Quaker from North Carolina, travels to Colorado to marry a man she has met only twice. Their marriage is tested by the extreme harshness of their living conditions as well as by the secrets in their past.
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