The Global Transport of Dust

dirt is carried aloft. Drifting with the sus pended dust particles are soil pollutants such as herbicides and pesticides and a significant number of microorganisms? bacteria, viruses and fungi. We can gain some appreciation of how much micro bial life is actually floating in our atmos phere by perfonning a quick calculation. There are typically about one million bacteria per gram of soil, but lef s be con servative and suppose there are only 10,000 bacteria per gram of airborne sed iment. Assuming a modest one billion metric tons of sediment in the atmos phere, these numbers translate into a quintillion (1018) sediment-borne bacte ria moving around the planet each year?enough to form a microbial bridge between Earth and Jupiter.

[1]  L. Richardson.  Occurrence of the black band disease cyanobacterium on healthy corals of the Florida Keys , 1997 .

[2]  I. Nagelkerken,et al.  Caribbean sea-fan mortalities , 1996, Nature.

[3]  L. Richardson.  Coral diseases: what is really known? , 1998, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[4]  Richard T. Barber,et al.  African dust and the demise of Caribbean Coral Reefs , 2000 .

[5]  M. Howitt.  Asthma management in the Caribbean - an update. , 2000 .

[6]  J. Herman,et al.  African desert dust in the Caribbean atmosphere: Microbiology and public health , 2001 .

[7]  S. O'Hara,et al.  Exposure to airborne dust contaminated with pesticide in the Aral Sea region , 2000, The Lancet.

[8]  S. Perkins.  Dust, the thermostat: How tiny airborne particles manipulate global climate , 2001 .

[9]  François Dulac,et al.  Control of atmospheric export of dust from North Africa by the North Atlantic Oscillation , 1997, Nature.

[10]  J. Prospero.  Long‐term measurements of the transport of African mineral dust to the southeastern United States: Implications for regional air quality , 1999 .

[11]  C. Lindbergh,et al.  Collecting Micro-Organisms from the Arctic Atmosphere: With Field Notes and Material , 1935 .

[12]  C. Darwin.  An account of the Fine Dust which often falls on Vessels in the Atlantic Ocean. , 1846, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London.

[13]  T. Gill,et al.  Long‐range transport of North African dust to the eastern United States , 1997 .

[14]  L. Barrie,et al.  Trans-Pacific Air Pollution , 2000, Science.

[15]  The microbiology of the atmosphere , 1973 .

[16]  Michael T. Coe,et al.  Human and natural impacts on the water resources of the Lake Chad basin , 2001 .

[17]  M. Garstang,et al.  Temporal and spatial characteristics of Saharan dust outbreaks , 1996 .