Dust Bowl

A farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936. Iconic photo entitled "Dust Bowl Cimarron County, Oklahoma" taken by Arthur Rothstein.
Map of states and counties affected by the Dust Bowl between 1935 and 1938 originally prepared by the Soil Conservation Service. The most severely affected counties during this period are colored .

The Dust Bowl was the result of a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of natural factors (severe drought) and human-made factors: a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion, most notably the destruction of the natural topsoil by settlers in the region.[1][2] The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as long as eight years.[3]

The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, including John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and Dorothea Lange's photographs depicting the conditions of migrants, particularly Migrant Mother, taken in 1936.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference whatwelearned was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Ben Cook; Ron Miller; Richard Seager. "Did dust storms make the Dust Bowl drought worse?". Columbia University. Archived from the original on November 2, 2018. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  3. ^ "Drought: A Paleo Perspective – 20th Century Drought". National Climatic Data Center. Archived from the original on February 8, 2017. Retrieved April 5, 2009.

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