Dust storms are sweeping across the world, harming the health of millions of people. Now, scientists are racing to keep the dirt on the ground.

"I couldn't see more than 50ft [15m] ahead," says Dave Dubois. "It was a once-in-a-decade type of storm."

In the spring of 2025, Dave Dubois, New Mexico State's climatologist, drove to a weather station a few hours north from his home in Las Cruces, a town on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico. On the way, he passed the blistering sand dunes of White Sands National Park and the UFO hotbed of Roswell. While performing routine maintenance on a monitoring sensor, a powerful cloud of dust descended. The lack of visibility led to a terrifying pile-up on a major interstate, causing several injuries.

In the first three months of 2025, New Mexico saw 50 dust storms, with 18 March being the dustiest day on record. Accompanied by wildfires and wind gusts in excess of 70mph (113 km/h), the skies darkened as the "dusty inferno" spread across America.

Despite being sandwiched between Arizona and Texas, two states prone to dust storms, New Mexico sees fewer high-intensity events. But when intense winds blow across land parched by 25 years of climate change-amplified drought, "you have the perfect recipe," says Dubois.

The Chihuahan Desert event was triggered by a mid-latitude cyclone, a low-pressure storm system responsible for most of the severe weather events experienced at the ground level. The fallout from this dust storm extended across a huge area, with dirty rain reportedly falling as far away as Wisconsin and North Carolina. The cyclone also spawned dust storms in the greater southwest and southern Plains regions, tornadoes in the Southeast, wildfires in the South, blizzards in the Midwest, and heavy rains in the Northeast.

Similar to other extreme weather events, dust and sand storms are becoming more common. These events, exacerbated by climate change, whip up soil, sand and other particulates into veils of dirt that are often disruptive and sometimes deadly. They impact us in surprising ways, from affecting our health through the spread of diseases, such as meningitis, to influencing nature's water cycles, accelerating snowmelt by blanketing snow and causing it to thaw faster.

Dust storms are a natural – and to an extent, beneficial – part of the Earth's climate and weather system, acting as a fertiliser for marine ecosystems. "The entire universe is made of dust, and it's always travelling, from star to star, from the sky to Earth, from Africa to the Amazon," says Daniel Tong, associate professor and atmospheric scientist at George Mason University in the US.

"People think that dust is just a part of the environment, part of the natural process," says Tong. "But it has a greater impact on the economy and public health than some better-known weather and climate disasters."

The race is now on to better understand these extreme weather events – and prevent some of them from happening.

The frequency of large dust storms in the southwestern US more than doubled from 1990 to 2011, according to a Noaa-led study. The same trend is apparent globally. The UN Environment Programme says in some areas desert dust increased twofold during the 20th Century.

Many such areas are in the Middle East and North Africa, home to the Arabian and Sahara........

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