ArtCenter Gallery - NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC and data from the CALIPSO team. Edited from story by Adam Voiland.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC and data from the CALIPSO team. Edited from story by Adam Voiland.

Winds routinely drive clouds of Saharan dust out of West Africa and across the Atlantic Ocean in the summer. But the intensity and extent of a plume that departed Africa in June 2020 were so great that some called it the Godzilla dust cloud. As dust blanketed the Caribbean Sea and darkened skies in several states in the southeastern United States, meteorologists described the event as historic. Air quality plummeted wherever the dust reached. Dry, dusty air can inhibit hurricane formation, and dust can trigger phytoplankton blooms in the ocean and even fertilize the Amazon rain forest.