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Arthur Rothstein's Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm, a Resettlement Administration photograph taken in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, in April 1936. The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s.
According to numerous studies, the 1934–35 droughts and heat might have certainly been the worst such events in the 20th century at that particular time. [4] Several states, however, were worse affected when the 1936 North American heat waves and drought spells developed that year and reset records across those areas. [2]
[1] The drought in 1934 was described as "the worst ever in U.S. history, covering more than 75 percent of the country and affecting 27 states severely." [2] The DRS bought cattle in counties which were designated emergency areas, where cattle were in danger of starvation due to drought. [3] The prices paid ranged from $14 to $20 a head.
The term "Dust Bowl" initially described a series of dust storms that hit the prairies of Canada and the United States during the 1930s. [4] It now describes the area in the United States most affected by the storms, including western Kansas, eastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. [5]
Events from the year 1931 in the United States. Incumbents. Federal government. President: Herbert Hoover (R-California) Vice President: Charles Curtis (R-Kansas)
From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson shows the effects of the Great Depression; due to extreme drought conditions, farms across the south-central United States become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads; The Empire of Japan invades China, which eventually leads to the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Unlike the Russian famine of 1921–1922, Russia's intermittent drought was not severe in the affected areas at this time. [31] Despite this, historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft says that "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions", [32] within the Soviet Union.
The drought is largely driven by temperature, which increases the rate of evaporation, with some contribution from the lack of precipitation. The several wet years since 2000 were not sufficient to end the drought. Researchers calculated that without climate change-induced evaporation, the precipitation in 2005 would have broken the drought.