Gobi Desert - in Anchorage
First up - sorry about the lack of posts for the past ten days. It’s been another stretch where I got whumped by the CFS stick.
Anyhoo, a blanket of sorts has settled in over Anchorage. It’s hazy. Really hazy. And the haze is not locally generated - it’s not dust left over from winter sanding. Nope, this is foreign stuff - a combination of fine particles from the Gobi Desert (the Gobi Desert located in Mongolia) and smoke from huge Siberian forest fires.
Here’s a more detailed explanation from today’s Daily News.. This paragraph provides an overview:
Annual sand storms in the Gobi Desert often assault neighboring areas with drifting grit dubbed Kosa, meaning “yellow sand,” by the Japanese, whose islands it frequently crosses, said Catherine Cahill, a researcher with the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
Such storms are common through April and May, and the dust routinely reaches Alaska and beyond, she said.
“This is actually fairly normal,” she said. “Pretty much every spring, we get a huge amount of dust from the Gobi Desert. Some years we get more dust than others. This is definitely a worse year.”
But not the worst in recent years. The spring of 2001 was the fourth-dustiest on record in Asia, with the minuscule dust particles drifting across the entire U.S. and even into Greenland, Cahill said.
This year, dust is only half the problem. Massive wildfires spanning a huge swath of southern Siberia in the Russian Far East broke out last week, contributing smoke to the mix and worsening an unusually dusty spring, Albanese said. One can’t smell the smoke because of its lofty position in the sky, he said.
Here are a few pics:
The view East to the mountains:
The view North.
Another shot looking North.
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