TONS OF SAND SMOTHER BEIJING
April 2006 - 300,000 tons of sand and dust landed on Beijing this spring, as the growing problem of desertification in Inner and Outer Mongolia impacts a wide swatch of Asian real estate, not to mention and hundreds of millions of people. Although phenomena like sand and dust are nothing new in China, they are becoming more intense and more frequent: they are now anual events. Originating in the ever-expanding Gobi Desert [Twice the size of Texas], these monsters of nature are spreading south and east into the more densely populated areas of China and also carry across the Pacific as far as Arizona and Utah (where skies were darkened in 2001.
The cause is the same as the disastrous depression era Dust Bowl in the United States: farming in places that are inherently unfit for farming. The amount of land subject to rapid desertification in Monglia is roughly 50,000 square miles, and area about the size of New York State.
