The American Dust Belt

Image of the Day: Satellite view of smoke from wildfires in the U.S. West spreading eastward, 12-14 August 2012

Desdemona Despair,

20 August, 2012

Intense wildfires in California and Idaho sent smoke eastward across the United States in mid-August 2012. Smoke affected air quality as far away as the Great Lakes Region, and some of the thickest smoke stretched from the Dakotas to Texas.

Wildfire smoke is a combination of gases and aerosols—tiny solid and liquid particles suspended in air—so remote-sensing instruments that detect aerosols can find smoke. The maps above are made from data collected by the Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite (OMPS) on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. They show relative aerosol concentrations over the continental United States, with lower concentrations appearing in yellow and higher concentrations appearing in dark orange-brown. Areas in gray represent data screened out due to sunglint (reflection of sunlight) or other factors.

On 14 August 2012, a band of dense aerosols stretched from the West Coast through Wyoming. The next day, thick aerosols collected over parts of North Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. High concentrations almost completely shrouded South Dakota and Kansas. On August 16, aerosols formed a southward-dipping arc from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes Region.

On 16 August 2012, the “Smog Blog” at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County reported that dense smoke stretched from the West Coast to the Great Lakes, and northward into Canada. Thinner smoke persisted across most of the United States. The Incident Information System reported that, as of August 17, some of the largest fires in the western states—Chips, Reading, Mustang Complex, Halstead, and Trinity Ridge—continued to burn, promising to send more thick smoke eastward across the country.

Horses fall victim to hard times and dry times on the range

Desdemona Despair,

20 August, 2012

AZTEC, New Mexico – The land is parched, the fields are withering and thousands of the nation’s horses are being left to fend for themselves on the dried range, abandoned by people who can no longer afford to feed them.

They have been dropping dead in the Navajo reservation in the Southwest, where neighbors are battling neighbors and livestock for water, an inherently scant resource on tribal land. They have been found stumbling through state parks in Missouri, in backyards and along country roads in Illinois, and among ranch herds in Texas where they do not belong.

Some are taken to rescue farms or foster homes — lifelines that are also buckling under the pressure of the nation’s worst drought in half a century, which has pushed the price of grain and hay needed to feed the animals beyond the reach of many families already struggling in the tight economy.

And still the drought rages on. The most recent federal assessment is that parts of at least 33 states, mostly in the West and the Midwest, are experiencing drought conditions that are severe or worse. It is affecting 87 percent of the land dedicated to growing corn, 63 percent of the land for hay and 72 percent of the land used for cattle.

With water tables falling, fields are crusting and cracking, creeks are running dry. Water holes first shrink, then vanish altogether. And dozens of wildfires are consuming forests and grassland across the West.

While precise figures are hard to come by, rough estimates from the Unwanted Horse Coalition, an alliance of equine organizations based in Washington, puts the number of unwanted horses — those given up on by their owners for whatever reasons — at 170,000 to 180,000 nationwide, said Ericka Caslin, the group’s director.

Many more could be out there, though. The Navajos, for instance, have no tally on the number of feral horses on their land; a $2 million effort to count and round them up was vetoed by the tribe’s president because of the cost.

Here, in this speck of a city in northern New Mexico, just outside Navajo territory, Debbie Coburn has been scrambling to enlist volunteers and raise money to feed, clean and care for three times as many abandoned horses as she had in her rescue farm, Four Corners Equine Rescue, through all of last year.

She gets up almost every day to find messages in her computer from people whose horses are in desperate need of help. One recent morning, a woman writing on behalf of her elderly parents who live just east of Albuquerque said, “They have scraped by every week to purchase a bale of hay for their horse, but they just can’t do it anymore.”

At $8 to $12 for a bale of roughly 60 pounds, enough to feed a riding horse for maybe three days, hay already costs five times what it did 10 years ago, Ms. Coburn said. This summer’s anemic harvest has spurred competition for a limited supply among ranchers big and small, from nearby cities and also from out of state. And as a rule, the price of hay goes up in the cold months; it doubled last winter, when the drought’s devastating effects first began to sprout.

“This winter, to be quite blunt, scares the hell out of me,” Ms. Coburn said as she walked across the corrals where the horses are kept, some of them in improvised pens enclosed not by steel barriers, but by electric fence. (The horses have arrived faster than she has been able to make room for them.)

“At this point,” she added, “it’s just too late for rain alone to solve our problems.” […]