Howdy, peeps! Heather, I saw your "hi," but I came back 20 minutes after and by that time you were off. I'm sorry.
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Ok, I know I said I would
tell y'all about bowling with Heather today, but I wanna post something else. If I have the inclination to do a double post, the entry will be about bowling, I promise. Right now, I feel a little...dusty.
Dust to...DustLittle boy: "Mommy, is it true that we come from dust and we'll go as dust?"
Mommy: "Yes, dear."
Little boy: "Well, some is either coming or going under my bed!"
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"Pollen" is the Latin word for
flour or
dust.
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Pink Elephants...Oh My!The rock in some parts of Africa and India is colored red. This, naturally, makes red dust and red mud. Elephants enjoy taking dust and mud baths to keep cool. The red dirt gives their skin a pink hue. Therefore, you may actually see pink elephants even when you're sober!
Who'da thunk?
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Look out! It's a Dust Storm!The Seistan Basin in Iran gets to 80 dust storms a year, making it one of the dustiest places on Earth.
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A World Traveler...Dust researchers
(who'd in their right mind would make it their profession to study dust??) went to the Caribbean island of Barbados to collect space dust. Their logic was that the wind, having crossed the entire Atlantic, would be clean of Eath dust by the time it reached Barbados, 3,000 miles away. Instead of collecting space dust, what they collected was a great deal of red dust from the Sahara Desert.
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Barbados is made entirely of gray and white coral. Yet the island's soil, instead of being either white or gray, is actually a reddish-orange. Researchers have found that the soil's composition doesn't match that of coral, but matches instead that of the sand found in the Sahara.
(hmm, why doesn't that surprise us??) Over eons dust from this desert has traveled the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean to fall on Barbados, building the soil to a depth of several feet.
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Cleansing the AirMoisture in the atmosphere condenses as it cools. However, the water must condense on something that it can cling to. Dust serves that purpose. In air that contains absolutely no dust, droplets would simply bounce off each other and would not condense until the atmosphere reached an incredible 300% humidity. If you were to walk into such an environment, you would be instantly soaked as the moisture condensed on you. Every single drop of rain and snow that falls contains a piece of dust, so precipitation really does "clean" the air.
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Melting GlaciersIn 1991, a heavy layer of airborne dust
(from our ever sharing Sahara Desert, no less) fell on a glacier in the Alps, causing the ice to melt back enough to reveal the remains of the Ice Man--a Copper-Age man who had died and been entombed by ice for more than 5,000 years.
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Soot holds heat 50 times better than desert dust and 200 times better than volcanic ash. If a nuclear holocaust threw tremendous amounts of particulate matter into the atmosphere, the dust and soot landing on ice sheets, ice caps and ice caps would cause them to melt, raising the level of the oceans.
Boy, it sure is dusty in here! *coughs and decides she better dust her computer screen off*
Dusty facts compiled from Tidbits newsletter
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If you don't make dust, you eat dust.
~Proverb~
..:: Remembered�����E�����Occuring ::..
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