A thick cloud of dust formed within minutes and blanketed part of Interstate 55—Illinois’ main thoroughfare between St. Louis and Chicago—during a white blizzard on May 1. The drivers applied the brakes, but not fast enough. Car after car collided, killing seven people and leaving the mangled remains of 72 vehicles on both sides of the highway.

For such a tragedy to occur in the Midwest, a perfect storm of factors would have to converge, says National Weather Service meteorologist Chuck Shaffer, who has tracked the impressive wall of dust in satellite imagery. In this case, straight-line winds swept over crop fields near the Interstate just after farmers plowed them, loosening topsoil that had been unusually dry in weeks without rain. This combination of circumstances does not happen often, which means that dust storms in Illinois are rare. But with the effects of climate change and an ever-expanding agricultural industry, such storms could become a growing problem across the Great Plains and the Midwest, researchers warn. This concern has even led some scholars to wonder if the central part of the country will collapse. new dust collector. The original dust bowl of the 1930s was the worst drought in U.S. history, causing unprecedented dust storms and devastating agriculture.

“These were storms that eroded hundreds of millions of pounds of topsoil and spread dust all the way to New York City,” says Benjamin Cook, a climate change and drought scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Agricultural intensification—cultivating the prairies for corn and wheat—helped create the original Dust Bowl, Cook showed in his study. After the disaster, the State Soil Protection Service took important steps to improve practices that led to soil degradation. Farmers currently rely heavily on irrigation to keep dust under control. But experts say today’s traditional farming practices still put the soil at risk.

“Conventional agricultural practices are very intensive,” says Evan Thaler, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who specializes in agricultural soil erosion in the Midwest. “They plow the heap for weed control and soil moisture control, and what happens is that the soil becomes really nice and fluffy, and it’s easy to wash away with water and wind.” And in winter, when the plants do not grow, the soil remains bare and open. Thaler and his colleagues calculated that over the past 160 years a third of the dark topsoil that made the Midwest famous for its agriculture has been eroded.

The impact of agriculture on dust has also been seen more widely. In a recent study by Ganneth Hallar, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah, and her then graduate student, Andrew Lambert, discovered levels of atmospheric dust in the Great Plains. increased by 5 percent per year between 2000 and 2018.That’s nearly doubling the amount of dust in two decades. The increase is in line with the area that farmers converted from pasture to arable land during this period. Dust concentration was highest during spring planting and autumn harvest.

And agriculture is still expanding. Policies that encourage biofuel production force farmers to turn even land that is less agriculturally productive into corn fields for ethanol production, and those lands then produce more dust, Hallar says. Only a tenth of a percent of the prairie that held the soil for centuries in Illinois, the “prairie state,” remains today. More broadly, less than 4 percent of North America’s original tallgrass prairie has yet to be plowed. Even some land returned to the prairie by the USDA Reserve Conservation Program (CRP) has been converted back to arable land. “It’s more profitable to have even low-yielding crops in marginal areas compared to what the USDA pays for CRP land,” says Thaler.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate the dust problem in some places, as changes in weather patterns reduce rainfall and high temperatures dry out soils more quickly. “Much of the western United States has been locked in an almost continuous drought for the past 20 years,” says Cook. There and on the Great Plains, “if we see a further increase in aridity and drought, as we expect with climate change, we will begin to see a further increase in atmospheric dustiness.” Scientists are actively studying pockets of dust near highways in the southwest and have received identified the Great Plains and the Midwest as regions to watch.

While much of the west, southwest, and Great Plains becomes third in climate change, Illinois tends to get wetter, with more frequent heavy rainfall and localized flooding. However, the amount of dust is still increasing. Hallar’s data shows that the south-central region of the state, where the May storm originated, is getting dustier by about 2 percent a year. This points to the role that agriculture is playing here and makes the government responsible for encouraging more efficient farming practices, Thaler says. One way to deal with dust is no-till farming, which uses a special planter that plants seeds into the ground in tiny furrows, eliminating the need to plow the soil. Another is cover cropping, which involves planting crops such as oats or hairy vetch in the winter so that the fields are never left bare and unprotected.

“Combined, these two methods have been shown to reduce erosion by about 95 percent,” says Thaler. Congress has the option to include incentives for sustainable farming practices in a farming bill due to be revised this year, although Thaler is not sure if that will happen. “At the end of the day,” he says, “it’s all about politics.”

Encouraging such practices and continued irrigation could help prevent a Dust Bowl of disaster proportions from the 1930s, Cook said. Hallar agrees. “I would say this is a new trend that we should be very concerned about,” she says. “Will it be as bad as the Dust Bowl? We cannot say this. But this is something we should all be aware of and pay attention to.”