What really caused the Dust Bowl?
Jeffrey A. Lee, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX; and T. E. Gill The most severe wind erosion in the history of the United States happened during the 1930s in a region known as the Dust Bowl. Agricultural lands were badly degraded over an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and dust storms originating in the Dust Bowl core region carried massive amounts of mineral aerosols eastward across North America and into the Atlantic Ocean. Over the years, evaluations of the Dust Bowl disaster generally have approached it from the perspective of it either being an anthropogenic (land management) phenomenon or a short-term climatic fluctuation (an extreme drought). From a land management point of view, certain tillage practices prevalent in the southern Great Plains in the 1930s degraded soil aggregate stability. The economic depression, coupled with the drought, prevented most farmers from managing the soil to reduce erosion through other forms of tillage and maintaining a crop
