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May
15, 2003:
The Amazing World Of Dust II
Interview
with Hannah Holmes author of The
Secret Life Of Dust
Mike
Carruthers:
You probably don't give a lot of thought to dust, but it is fascinating.
For one thing, it travels--particularly desert dust.
Hannah
Holmes:
Dust travels across the ocean so regularly that the entire
east coast of the U.S. gets powdered with Saharan dust, maybe
once, twice, three times a year.
Hannah Holmes
author of the book The
Secret Life Of Dust.
And the
west coast gets powdered with dust from the Asian deserts every
March and April. There are huge dust storms in all of the world's
deserts, and the dust flows off of those deserts like big, gold
rivers, and it can go thousands of miles before it settles.
And dust,
when it travels, often bring passengers.
Some
people took samples of dust that flew from the Sahara Desert
to the Caribbean Islands and they grew the dust on petri dishes,
and grew 125 different kinds of fungi and bacteria that had
been traveling in the dust all the way from the Sahara.
And Hannah
says desert dust travels so much…
That
along with the desert dust that blows around the planet, you're
getting a little bit of everything else too--like anyone who
was buried in the desert, like the mummies of Egypt, and Genghis
Khan and Mongolia and dinosaurs that died in the desert. So
we really have in our houses tiny bits of kings and dinosaurs
and who knows what else. We have wonderful stuff.
For transcripts,
visit our web site somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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